Simon Marsh
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Chairman of the Kent and East Sussex Railway since November 2018.
I have been involved in railway preservation from a very early age, as far back as the 1970s when things were very different. As well as the Kent and East Sussex Rly I was at one time an active volunteer with the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland.
Most of my volunteering has been on the operating side – signalman and guard – but I have also had much experience of permanent way work and the installation of signalling equipment. I have worked in customer-facing roles and even as a regular washer-up on our Pullman dining train. Being a director/trustee has left very little room for more active and visible volunteering, but I hope to rectify this in 2022.
I was invited to stand for the Kent and East Sussex board in 2017, and I became chairman in the following year. Since then we have weathered Covid and laid the foundations for the Railway to develop and thrive going forward.
I believe that the heritage railway sector needs to mature further, and to recognise that it consists of businesses – some of them quite large – that will have to continue to adapt to meet current and future challenges. Collectively we have come a long way in recent years but there is still a distance to travel. We need to appeal to a much wider range of people than some of us do at present – as visitors and as volunteers.
We also need to share more with each other. We are a lot stronger together than as a group of separate organisations. It doesn’t make sense for all of us to work largely in isolation from each other. The HRA can join the dots, and by so doing add real value to the sector as a whole.
In my other life I am semi-retired and before that I was for many years a senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office, working in London and in Belfast.
