Mott MacDonald

The Mott MacDonald Group is a multidisciplinary consultancy with headquarters in the United Kingdom. It provides engineering, management and development services internationally, with 16,000 staff in 140 countries. Mott MacDonald is one of the largest employee-owned companies in the world.

It was established in 1989 by the merger of Mott, Hay and Anderson with Sir M MacDonald & Partners. It has won more than 500 industry awards in the last five years and is among the top ranked firms in the annual league tables published by Engineering News Record and New Civil Engineer. Projects completed by the firm include the Hong Kong International Airport and the Channel Tunnel.

History

Mott MacDonald was formed in 1989 through the merger of Mott, Hay and Anderson, and Sir M MacDonald & Partners. Mott, Hay and Anderson was a transportation engineering consultancy responsible for projects such as the London Underground while Sir M MacDonald & Partners was a water engineering consultancy with projects that included the Aswan Dam. The merger made Mott MacDonald one of the first international engineering, management, and development consultancies.

Mott

Mott is both a surname and a given name. Notable people with the name include:

Round Table

The Round Table is King Arthur's famed table in the Arthurian legend, around which he and his Knights congregate. As its name suggests, it has no head, implying that everyone who sits there has equal status. The table was first described in 1155 by Wace, who relied on previous depictions of Arthur's fabulous retinue. The symbolism of the Round Table developed over time; by the close of the 12th century it had come to represent the chivalric order associated with Arthur's court, the Knights of the Round Table.

History

The Round Table first appears in Wace's Roman de Brut, a Norman language adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae finished in 1155. Wace says Arthur created the Round Table to prevent quarrels among his barons, none of whom would accept a lower place than the others.Layamon added to the story when he adapted Wace's work into the Middle English Brut in the early 13th century, saying that the quarrel between Arthur's vassals led to violence at a Yuletide feast. In response a Cornish carpenter built an enormous but easily transportable Round Table to prevent further dispute. Wace claims he was not the source of the Round Table; both he and Layamon credited it instead to the Bretons. Some scholars have doubted this claim, while others believe it may be true. There is some similarity between the chroniclers' description of the Round Table and a custom recorded in Celtic stories, in which warriors sit in a circle around the king or lead warrior, in some cases feuding over the order of precedence as in Layamon. There is a possibility that Wace, contrary to his own claims, derived Arthur's round table not from any Breton source, but rather from medieval biographies of Charlemagne—notably Einhard's Vita Caroli and Notker the Stammerer's De Carolo Magno—in which the king is said to have possessed a round table decorated with a map of Rome.

Network Rail

Network Rail is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd which was known as Railtrack plc before 2003) and infrastructure manager of most of the rail network in England, Scotland and Wales. Network Rail is a 'not for dividend' company with no shareholders which reinvests its income in the railways.

Network Rail's main customers are the private train operating companies (TOCs), responsible for passenger transport, and freight operating companies (FOCs), who provide train services on the infrastructure that the company owns and maintains. Since 1 September 2014, Network Rail has been classified as a "public sector body".

To cope with quickly rising passenger numbers, Network Rail is currently undertaking a £38 billion programme of upgrades to the network, including Crossrail, electrification of lines, upgrading Thameslink and a new high-speed line (HS2).

History

Pre-2002

Britain's railway system was built by private companies, but it was nationalised by the Transport Act 1947 and run by British Railways until re-privatisation in the 1990s. Infrastructure and passenger and freight services were separated at that time. Between 1994 and 2002 the infrastructure was owned and operated by Railtrack.