Dr Nathan Darroch

With a passion for supporting the learning and development of others at all ages and career stages, I am seeking PhD candidates from industry, who wish to apply their knowledge and experience to developing innovative new approaches to railway engineering management, to align the industry to meeting 21st century customer, commercial, and social value needs.

During my time at LSBU:

• I have been Course Leader for Rail Systems Engineering Aprenticeships, leading a multi-disciplinary team of academics, in the development and delivery of engineering and operational management learning, motivating and mentoring our multi-disciplinary railway apprentices from organisations such as Network Rail, TfL, WSP, Siemens, etc., to high standards;

• directed the delivery of railway engineering and operations management teaching, through a customer focus, leadership, and stakeholder engagement, to ensure LSBU has the skills and resources to deliver successful opportunities for our clients.

For 12.5 years at London Underground, collaborating with solicitors, engineers, project teams, urban planners, construction contractors, and land/asset owners, within London Underground, TfL, Network Rail, local authorities, land/property owners and their contractors:

• I led the undertaking of over 4000 analyses of the legal and property interfaces of railway infrastructure and its environment for LU, TfL, and Network Rail, Thames Water, other utilities companies, and urban landowners. 
• Managed quality assurance in relation to the identification of land and asset interests and rights, negotiation of access to land for surveys, consents and acquisition of land rights for both large, medium, and small-scale infrastructure development projects. Such as the Bakerloo Line Extension project, Victoria Station Upgrade, and Smithfield Meat Market refurbishment. Employing railway authorising and general railway legislation, such as the Metropolitan Railway Acts 1853, 1859, and 1861, and the Railway Clauses Consolidation Act 1845, elements of which are incorporated within the High-Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act 2017.

• qualitative analysis of the legal, engineered, historical, and land-use planning intefaces of railway and third party land and sturctures, in the UK and internationally;
• application of Natural Language Processing to extract core data from legal agreements, relating to railway and third-party land and structures;
• qualitative applications of railway systems engineering, and project, quality, risk, asset management within the 21st century railway industry;
• development of an Asset Interface Register to record and share multi-disciplinary data on railway and third party land and sturctures, in the UK and internationally;
• the need for UK and international Higher Education Institutes to adapt learning oppurtunities to meet 21st century railway industry needs from their graduate engineers;
• methodologies for delivering 21st century railway engineering knowledge, skills, and behaviours, within UK and international higher education.

• Year 1 - L4 - Railway Industry Professional Practice;
• Year 1 - L4 - Traction & Rolling Stock;
• Year 1 - L4 - Project & Asset Management;
• Year 2 - L4 - Plotting & mapping the Railway;
• Year 2 - L5 - Railway Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability;
• Year 3 - L5 - Railway Team Engineering Project;
• Year 4 - L6 - Asset Data Management;
• Year 4 - L6 - Apprenticeship End Point Assesment.

At the University of Aberdeen as Guest Senior Lecturer:

• MSc in Transport Planning Appraisal to Evaluation.