Tom Joyner, Managing Director of KeolisAmey Luas, is interviewed by The Sunday Times.
In the early hours of September 1, Tom Joyner turned up at the Luas offices at the Red Cow depot in Dublin for a big moment. After 22 years of running the tram service, the French company Transdev was leaving the station.
Six months earlier, in March, KeolisAmey had won a lucrative €1.3bn contract to operate and maintain Dublin’s light railway system.
As the new operator stepped into the driver’s seat, the aim was to have as smooth a transition as possible. The changing of guard had to take place at 2am, after all the trams had returned home for the night. It was done with a handshake as the outgoing managing director left his post.
“The worst thing you could possibly do is try to change over when trams are running because you’d end up with a situation where the driver worked for one company when he left the depot and halfway through the journey, as he’s passing Jervis, for example, then works for KeolisAmey,” Joyner said.
Under the deal, about 750 employees have transferred from Transdev to KeolisAmey Luas, under the transfer of undertakings (protection of employment) regulations, better known as Tupe.
Just two KeolisAmey employees have relocated to Dublin to work in the business: Joyner, as managing director, and Sandrine Jardin, the company’s finance director, who moved from France.
“I’m really pleased that the majority of the execs [we’ll be working with] have got this fantastic experience at Luas,” Joyner said.
The contract was a coup for KeolisAmey, a joint venture between Keolis, a French company that is one of the world’s biggest public transport operators, and Amey, a London-headquartered global infrastructure consultancy.
The contract will run for seven years, with an option to extend for an additional six. KeolisAmey now has the job of operating and maintaining a network that will be used by 60 million passengers this year.
Joyner believes the joint venture won the contract because it has “real experience, particularly with trams, but also running railways and buses”.
Keolis, which both designs and operates public transport systems, works in 14 countries, including the UK, US and China. It operates trains in Boston, Bordeaux and Australia’s Gold Coast, as well as a tram service in Dubai.
The company, which employs close to 70,000 people, had revenues of more than €7.1bn in 2025. Last year it was part of a consortium that won a contract to design, build and operate a new high-speed rail network connecting Quebec city and Toronto, the largest rail project in Canada’s history.
London-headquartered Amey, meanwhile, had a turnover of £1.8bn last year. It employs over 11,000 people and operates in regions including the UK, Australia, the US and the Caribbean.
Amey set up an office in Dublin in January, with plans to create 200 jobs within the next three years. Last month it won its first big contract here, with Irish Rail. The €40m deal will put Amey in charge of signalling, electrification and telecoms works on the train system.
The Luas contract is not the first joint venture for Keolis and Amey. The combined business already operates the Docklands Light Railway in London and Manchester’s Metrolink tram network.
“Ireland and Dublin have got a really good deal, actually,” Joyner said.
Since operation of the Luas was handed over to KeolisAmey on September 1, Joyner’s main goal has been to have a “seamless transition”. He said: “My honest hope is that people haven’t noticed there is a new operator.”
However, the company has “good plans” for the future.
“When I’ve spoken to the client [Transport Infrastructure Ireland] and different government bodies, what they want to do is to have a world-class city with world-class passenger transport. Certainly that’s the ambition I have.”
With the transition now complete — though the offices at the Red Cow still need to be repainted and rebranded — Joyner is looking to the long haul.
One of KeolisAmey’s big tasks is to make the Luas more reliable and improve the customer experience.
The next step is to “really study” how the Luas service works, to collate data and bring in experts to examine whether to increase the frequency of the trams, according to Joyner. “We will work out how we best enhance this timetable,” he said.
Joyner wants to make sure that the right services are in place to cope with big events such as the recent Katie Taylor fight in Croke Park or Westlife concerts at the 3Arena.
“Dublin has a lot of events. It’s one of the things that makes it a great city,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at how events are managed here compared to events worldwide. I’ve got a small team coming over just to look at it and to examine how we can make it slightly better.”
He also has plans to take his executive team out on Friday and Saturday nights in November and December to try to understand the issues that the public and the company’s staff encounter. Incidentally, the Luas has a 97 per cent compliance rate with payment — much higher than the “Luas is free” meme online would have people believe.
As part of its winning bid, the company also promised to invest in the light rail infrastructure across the network. The company has 43km of track to maintain, as well as seven park and ride locations.
“Infrastructure work is definitely needed,” Joyner said. “One of the things that we want to do is make the Luas as flexible as possible. That could, for example, be us looking at the layout to turn trams in more places so that we could still keep the service running if there’s some type of interruption.”
The company will work with Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) on the order of 35 new trams, which will replace the Red Line fleet. It will also be involved in the Luas Finglas and Luas Lucan services, both of which are targeted to be operational between 2031 and 2036.
This is the first time that Joyner has headed up a tram operation but he does have 30 years’ experience working in the public transport sector.
The 51-year-old grew up in a small village in rural Norfolk in eastern England, where the family would go for walks on a disused railway about a mile away.
After doing work experience on a local newspaper at 14, he abandoned his original dream of a career in journalism to become a train guard.
“I have a memory of travelling with my mum on buses and trains, looking across at the bus conductor and train guard and thinking, ‘That’s what I’d like to do.’ But I was never a train spotter,” Joyner said.
His first job out of secondary school was working as a train guard whose responsibility it was to check tickets, ensure the doors of the train were closed before it departed, and to make sure the carriages were clean and safe.
While working at National Express, Joyner returned to education, completing a degree sponsored by his employer. He completed postgraduate diplomas in management studies at London Metropolitan University and an MBA at Bayes Business School in London. “Transport is still a place where you can have a career,” he said.
Joyner has moved “quite a bit” over the course of his career. He spent seven years working at National Express then moved to FirstGroup, the Scotland-based bus and rail operator, where he was promoted to operations director and his job was to lead the recovery of the commuter routes benefiting from a £5bn investment.
His first big management opportunity was running the suburban railways of London. “I loved that job,” he said. “It was a job where you were dealing in sometimes quite difficult areas but it was hugely rewarding.”
Joyner first worked for Keolis in 2013 when he was tasked with turning around London Midland, a joint venture between Go-Ahead Group and Keolis.
“It was a pretty broken railway business. Most trains were late or cancelled, there was terrible trouble with the union, so I was asked to go in there and turn that around,” he said.
He stayed with London Midland for four and a half years. In 2017 he moved to Arriva, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, the German transport operator, which at the time had a number of international subsidiaries.
Joyner spent two years heading up Arriva Trains Wales and nearly five as managing director of CrossCountry Trains, a franchise operated by Arriva.
Under Joyner’s watch, CrossCountry became the first train operator in the UK to introduce bleed control kits, which stem extreme bleeding. He worked with the Daniel Baird Foundation, a charity set up in the memory of a Birmingham stabbing victim, on the initiative.
“Just having one of those kits available — at a very minimal cost — can save lives. There’s a lot of people who die because there’s just no way of stopping the blood flow,” Joyner said.
“We’ve plans to work with charities in Dublin to help further,” he added, pointing to dementia, blindness and neurodiversity awareness charities as organisations with which he would like to work.
After over two decades working in trains, Joyner hopped on another mode of transport in 2024 when he moved to the buses, taking on a year-long contract role with Go-Ahead London. While there, he even learnt how to drive a double decker bus.
“Because why not?” he said. “My role at Go-Ahead was very much about transforming the company. We did a lot of work in converting our garages to all-electric and moving away from diesel.”
In August last year Keolis came knocking again, asking Joyner to move to the United Arab Emirates for five months to act as interim chief executive of Etihad Rail Operating Companies, a joint venture between Keolis and Etihad Rail, owned by the UAE government. His job was to prepare the business for the launch of the country’s first passenger railway.
“When I got there, it was different weather to anything I’d encountered, going up to 46 and 47 degrees but feeling like 54 degrees,” he said.
“I was involved in a lot of the civil engineering in terms of building the stations, and making sure the trains would work when they launched. The stations were mid-construction, so there was no air conditioning. It required drinking a lot of electrolytes and a lot of water, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.”
When he finished his MBA in 2005, Joyner toyed with the idea of leaving transport for something new, and a career that was not “24-7”, but he abandoned that idea quickly.
“Passenger transport is one of the few places in society where you have, working for it but also travelling on it, a total cross-section of people. And that’s a great thing,” he said.
“You do really come across all walks of life [on the Luas]. You’ll have solicitors who are travelling into work, you’ll have people going shopping, families heading to the arena. And then you’ll also have people who potentially lead some quite chaotic lives. We are proud to carry everyone.”
In July, after a Dublin Bus driver was attacked, Siptu, the trade union, called on the government to fulfil its promise to set up a transport police service. Just a month into the role, Joyner has already attended his first meeting about the service. “The intent that’s been signalled by the government is positive,” he said.
While Joyner’s focus is squarely on the Luas, KeolisAmey is treating the contract win as the company’s first stop on a longer journey to capture the Irish transport market. Future destinations could include operations and maintenance contracts of the Dublin MetroLink and Luas Cork, for example.
“The company wants Ireland to be a base for KeolisAmey, whereby it proves itself on the Luas and becomes a real partner to Ireland,” Joyner said.
The life of Tom Joyner
Age: 51
Lives: Dalkey, Dublin
Family: married to Sara with three children, Maia, 23, Lara, 15, and Rufus, 14
Education: London Metropolitan University and Bayes Business School
Favourite film: About Time, starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams
Favourite book: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Working day
A typical day for me starts around 7.30am, with an 8am team meeting to review performance and look ahead at the priorities for the day and week. The day tends to involve a walk around the Red Cow depot with our people director, lunch in the staff canteen and often meetings with our client, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, at Heuston, followed by some time observing the evening peak and travelling back on Luas. I finish the day with a visit to the engineering floor to catch up with the team before heading home around 6pm.
Downtime
I really like walking and travelling, and have walked some of the Camino de Santiago, with plans to go back.
The article was originally published by The Sunday Times: https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/luas-chief-dublin-tom-joyner-keolis-amey-vvhhwsx6x