Professional Engineering

Few roles bring as much overarching responsibility as that of David Waboso – head of capital programmes at London Underground. Waboso oversees a yearly budget of £1.3 billion spent on new trains, tracks, signals and stations across the Tube network. In every case, the consequence of poor project execution is massive travel disruption and costly delay.

Waboso’s role comes with an immensely varied workload. His in-tray includes a project to introduce a fleet of 191 air-conditioned walk-through trains and a new signalling system on sub-surface lines; the £300 million redevelopment of Bond Street station on Oxford Street; and a signalling upgrade on the Victoria line. Each project has unique challenges associated with technical complexity and the difficulty of carrying out the work on one of the busiest metros in the world. Yet Waboso relishes it all.

“I couldn’t do this role if I didn’t enjoy it – it would just be too wearing,” he says. But he does admit to losing sleep when his investment programmes don’t go according to plan. “I live in London, I travel on the Tube every day, and I feel the pain when we don’t get things right. If any bit of kit we put in doesn’t work or it causes disruption on the railway, then I take it very personally. I get very upset about it,” he says.

Although one of the most respected railway engineers in the country, his career nearly followed an altogether different path. His family had a long tradition in medicine and he was expected to follow suit. But a conversation with a careers adviser at school, combined with the natural contrariness of youth, gave him other ideas.

“The careers master enthused me about engineering. He told me engineers did wonderful things like designing and building the huge Kariba hydroelectric dam between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It captivated my imagination. I also wanted a job that meant I wouldn’t be stuck indoors all day and would offer me the chance to work around the world. And because my father was an eminent doctor there was also an element of me wanting to do something a little bit different.”

And so Waboso chose to study civil engineering at university, after which he secured his first job with Gloucestershire County Council overseeing road design and construction. But he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to be an engineer – and a spur-of-the-moment decision saw him divert temporarily to another profession. “I saw a newspaper advert saying ‘If you have an engineering degree, why don’t you come and teach maths in London?’ So I thought ‘Why not?’ I literally got off the Tube, went straight to the Inner London Education Authority and the next day I was teaching at a school in Stoke Newington – in one of the poorest boroughs in the country.”

It was a baptism of fire. Many of the kids came from tough backgrounds and discipline at the school was poor. But despite being a young man with no teaching experience, Waboso wasn’t fazed. “The kids were a challenge – and then some!” he says. “But I was a very strict disciplinarian. I didn’t take any nonsense from them. It was a tough school – there were lots of bad things happening – but most of them were good kids who were desperate to be given a chance. I loved teaching there.”

He was shocked, however, at the toll that the stress of the job had taken on other teachers. He realised that it was not going to be a career for life, and began looking for ways of getting back into engineering. 

But he never regretted his teaching experience: it stood him in good stead for what was to follow. “Teaching gave me many skills that could be applied to other professions. It gave me confidence, it gave me the experience of walking into a hostile environment and winning over a crowd, and it gave me the ability to get on with very many different types of people,” he says.

It was consultancy Ove Arup that gave Waboso his route back into engineering, on a project overseeing the construction of a stretch of road linking the M25 to the A12 in Essex. The people management skills that he had learned in the classroom were soon put to the test. He was overseeing a construction project worth £30 million which included a couple of hundred men, hundreds of tonnes of plant and equipment, and health and safety considerations. “It was a lot of responsibility at a young age. Some of the contractors were tough guys – and that meant dealing with conflict and aggression. Being a young engineer in construction is one of the toughest ways to learn the ropes.”

After a couple of years with Ove Arup, Waboso joined Pell Frischmann, another firm of consulting engineers. This gave him the chance to spread his wings and work abroad – and he found himself taking up a role in Kaduna in Nigeria. There was a host of World Bank-funded engineering projects in the region and Waboso was given the opportunity to work on railway and road construction and a water supply scheme. 

He recalls this period of his life with real fondness: “Kaduna was a lovely place – an old colonial region with a good mix of local people and expats. It was a great time – there’s a lot of polo played in Nigeria and there was a good social life centred around that. I was also captain of the local rugby team. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there but after about three years I thought I’d better get back to the UK.”