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“David Lugsden deserves recognition for the Lifetime Achievement Award, due to the exemplary contributions he has made to the railway industry throughout his career. His leadership in successfully pioneering Quality Assurance on the railway and his determination in the early creation of the Network Rail Graduate Training Programme are his most worthy accomplishments.
David will be known to many of our railway colleagues in the North East region. He is a highly respected and knowledgeable Buildings & Civils Engineer.
David began his career in in 1973 for a local Tyneside civil engineering firm Brims & Co Ltd. He trained as a design engineer, before joining Balfour Beatty to eagerly take on more complex civils engineering work. He joined British Rail in February 1982 and steadily progressed his way up through the organisation. As he did so, his level of responsibility increased with mission-critical roles such as Track Relaying Manager at Newcastle and as P.Way Maintenance Engineer at Morpeth.
During the period of privatisation in the 1990s and into the 2000s, David had numerous assignments with design consultants such as Owen Williams and Atkins Rail; broadening his wealth of experience further. He later re-joined Network Rail, progressing to a Programme Engineering Manager in 2010; where he became the leader and expert in many railway areas including timber waybeam bridges and working on listed buildings.
David’s career history is rich in variety. As a junior engineer, he worked on the Kielder Water dam project and at Sellafield Reprocessing Plant. He was appointed as Resident Engineer on the Newcastle High-Level Bridge over the River Tyne. His role there was to ensure that the work on the Grade 1 listed cast-iron structure was executed precisely and safely in accordance with the design. He was also Resident Engineer for various viaduct strengthening and reconstruction schemes associated with the East Coast Mainline electrification in the 1980s.
David was Senior Engineer for the complex roof refurbishment at Newcastle station in the 1990s and he also held a senior engineering role in the Sunderland Direct metro extension scheme.
More recently, David has applied his vast engineering experience and strong influence on high-profile schemes such as the iconic £17 million Leeds station southern entrance, the £82 million state-of-the-art Hitachi Rail Vehicle Manufacturing Facility in Newton Aycliffe and the nationally significant Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade programme, currently valued at £2.9 billion.
Construction assurance and quality has been a keen focus throughout David’s career. In the early days of Railtrack, he led the Eastern Zone to become the first Quality Assured area of the organisation. Later as a consultant, he was Principal Assessor for the highly respected Network Certification Body [NCB]. Today, David is a Lead Discipline Engineer for Network Rail, representing the large ‘Northern Programmes’ team of civil engineers at a national level.
Helping other engineers to achieve professional status is another one of David’s central qualities. As a junior engineer himself, he studied part-time to achieve a civil engineering degree and later becoming a Chartered Professional. In the early days of Network Rail, he collaborated with the national Civil Engineering Contractors Association [CECA] in order to pilot a training scheme for incoming graduates. This was accepted by the Institute of Civil Engineering as an approved training agreement for the whole of Network Rail. Taking on the role of a Supervising Civil Engineer, David has since supervised some 17 railway civil engineers through their training since 2009. He continues to support junior Network Rail engineers today through the established Graduate Training Programme.
Throughout his career, David has admirably contributed to the development of railway civil engineers individually and has also shaped the future of railway civil engineering collectively. His wealth of experience, his collaborative nature of working, his leadership to support the younger generation to learn and grow and his ability to confidently provide direction certainly makes him most worthy of consideration for the Lifetime Achievement Award.“
“The Lifesaver award seeks to recognise those individuals who have intervened to potentially save the life of a vulnerable person on the rail network, and to demonstrate that talking and listening to someone in need can make a huge difference. Samaritans’ aims of breaking down barriers to intervening and the myths about suicide are now imbedded in rail culture with over 10,500 staff trained, while the number of interventions are up by 34% from April 2015. Empowering staff to support vulnerable members of the public, colleagues, friends or family remains a core part of the relationship between the rail industry and Samaritans and The Lifesaver award is an opportunity to highlight this crucial on-going work as well as encouraging rail staff to be champions for our service.”
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