Andy worked in the railway industry for all of his working life until taking early retirement in 2016 (in the main due to his MDS symptoms, although he didn't know he had MDS at that point).
He was involved in resource planning and also real-time incident and operations control for a variety of train operating companies across the UK, much of the time involving international freight flows.
During his career he was based at a variety of locations around London, at Doncaster for eight years, and also near Folkestone at the British end of the Channel Tunnel.
Andy Veitch
Outside work he couldn't quite escape railways and became involved in two heritage railway operations run by volunteers in the tourism sector, serving at one as a Director with responsibility for Marketing and Publicity for a period of over ten years. He was involved in defining and implementing operating standards, and training locomotive drivers and other operations volunteers for a railway system within a much larger and diverse heritage site in Kent, where he was a volunteer for over twenty years.
It was quite a long route to his eventual MDS diagnosis at age 56 in October 2018 (MDS-MLD, formerly MDS-RCMD) and having been given a copy of the MDS UK Patient Handbook 'Understanding Myelodysplastic Syndromes' by his local haematologist at Kent & Canterbury Hospital he registered as a member and began attending MDS patient support meetings at King's College Hospital.
Andy was married to Pat for over 40 years. During 2019 they both took up the challenge to set up a local MDS patient support group in Kent, and Andy was invited to join the MDS UK committee at the end of that year.
Andy played multiple roles in MDS UK, including serving as Interim Chair and as the Local Patient Support Ambassador for Kent.
