At the end of 2018 it was announced that Isle of Man Director of Transport Ian Longworth would be stepping down from his role as he started to prepare for retirement with a reduced hours job to manage Department of Infrastructure major capital projects. But fast forward 12 months and Mr Longworth is heading back to his old role – retirement seemingly put on the back burner!
The new role was always on a 12 month contract but the anticipation at that time was that Mr Longworth would then take the opportunity to fully retire, but not any more! Isle of Man Transport staff were informed in early January that the management structure would return to its 2018 structure with Mr Longworth as Director of Public Transport and the man who temporarily took the role, Ian Bates, returning to his role as Head of Operations.
Mr Longworth had been Director of Public Transport for 10 years and in this time passenger numbers across the island’s transport network have increased, especially on the heritage railways, with the Manx Electric Railway in particular now only seeing increases but also more trams available for use than for many years.