AFR: Howard Collins’s great train adventure →

Howard Collins

Eighteen months into the job, Howard Collins is clear-eyed about the slog ahead. Fixing ­Sydney rail will take billions of dollars and five to 10 years, he says.

CHARIS PERKINS, Australian Financial Review, 1st November 2014

Howard Collins “the Tube man”, as ­London mayor Boris Johnson called him, counts himself a lucky man. After 35 years with London Transport, he is delighted to wake up each morning in his house overlooking the sea in the south Sydney suburb of Woolooware – bought in blithe defiance of the city’s postcode snobbery – and catch an early train to Central.

And neither union battles, nor early criticism of his $500,000-plus salary, nor the ­gargantuan challenge of dragging Sydney’s antiquated railways into the 21st century can spoil his enthusiasm. At that stage in a solid career, when some might begin ticking off the years to retirement, the chief ­executive of Sydney Trains is a man ­invigorated by a new adventure.

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