Philip Martin Benham was born in 1949 and joined British Rail as a Traffic Student in 1968. During the privatisation period he was appointed as Business Restructuring Manager, East Coast in 1994, and in the same year worked as Project Director for the Ticketing and Inter-operator Contracts Implementation Team (TICIT) until 1996. In 1996 he moved to the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) as Assistant Director and Director Retail, in 1999 he became the Director Commercial of ATOC. He left ATOC in 2002 to become an independent consultant, before being appointed as the General Manager of the North York Moors Railway from 2004.