Welcome to the IRO Australia Area pages.

The IRO launched internationally in 2001 and is growing its Australian membership and provision of resources to the local industry. This encompasses those involved in day-of-operations delivery right through to the strategic planners and decision makers.

Jennifer Aiton and Richard Singleton have already established supportive groups in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland. Darren King is working with the IRO in the UK to undertake a review and an approach to rail organisation in Australia and to re contextualise one of our core texts – The Operators’ Handbook.

Jennifer Aiton
Jennifer graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Engineering with Honours and a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Western Australia in 2013. During her studies, she undertook an undergraduate position at the Public Transport Authority of the Government of Western Australia, working on strategic planning and demand analysis, and won the 2013 Railway Technical Society of Australasia (RTSA) Student Railway Thesis Award for her dissertation on demand-side performance improvements for services along Perth’s busiest railway lines.
Jennifer is now in her second year of the PTA graduate program, working in rail service planning and looks forward to attending the Conference on Railway Excellence (CORE) in Adelaide in May to represent the IRO and present a paper on smart-card demand modelling. This year, Jennifer is on the RTSA WA committee and is also completing a Master of Transport at Monash University.

Richard Singleton
Rick is currently a consultant with URS in rail operations and strategic planning and has seven years’ experience in the rail industry. He started his career as a rolling stock graduate engineer with Sydney trains, later taking on a project planning role on their $7bn fleet acquisition.
Rick has spent the last three years optimising passenger rail systems across Australia. He has examined capacity, punctuality, passenger service quality and rail infrastructure needs in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and most recently beautiful, sunny Perth.