Ian Conlon

Head of System Pillar

Ian Conlon is the Head of the System Pillar at Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking. The System Pillar is the ‘generic system integrator’ for the Europe’s Rail and the architect of the future EU’s railway system. The System Pillar provides governance, resource, and outputs to support a coherent and coordinated approach to the evolution of the rail system and the development of the system view, based on a formal functional system architecture approach to speed innovation and deployment. The System Pillar brings rail sector representatives under a single coordination body.  

 Prior to this role, he has had over 15 years of experience in the transport sector. Mr Conlon worked as a policy advisor in the Rail Safety and Interoperability Unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport where he was responsible for the coordination of the input to the regulation for Europe’s Rail.  He also worked as a policy advisor leading on rail investment issues. 

Before joining the European institutions, Mr Conlon served as an Assistant Director at PwC, in the Infrastructure Finance team leading commercial and financial advice to the public and private sector, including two EUR 1bn rolling stock deals. He also worked as a Head of Sector within the UK Department for Transport, including coordination of the financing deal with Transport for London which supplied the funding for Crossrail. 

Mr Conlon holds an PhD from the University of London, and an MA (Hons) from Cambridge University.