LONDON LETTER:Railways started in Britain, but soon it may build neither engines nor carriages
THOMAS GETHIN Clayton was a man blessed with considerable foresight. In the mid-1800s, Derby thrived on the back of the railways, occupying as it did a key place on the transport system, but, most importantly, because it made many of the engines and carriages.
Built by the Midland Railway, the Derby Carriage and Wagon Works grew rapidly from its inception in 1840. By 1873 the works had spread southwards to Litchurch Lane, which became known to locals as the “Carriage and Wagon”.
By then, Clayton was in command. The railway carriages of the day were 50ft long, but the Midland had just bought its first United States-made Pullman carriage, which were six feet longer. Clayton built sheds that could handle 70ft carriages.
They were still in use 100 years later.
Today, the Midland Railway Company has long gone, but Litchurch Lane still exists.
Every day, 3,000 workers, now employed by the Canadian firm Bombardier, go to work there – the last factory making engines and carriages anywhere in Britain.
However, the future of Litchurch Lane is in doubt. Last week, it lost out on a £1.5 billion contract to supply 1,200 carriages to upgrade the Thameslink line that runs between Bedford and Brighton, finishing behind a consortium led by Siemens.
Two year ago, Litchurch Lane was beaten for a contract to supply a new generation of intercity trains, including nearly 900 carriages. This time, the victor was the Japanese firm Hitachi, backed by British bank Barclays.
Clearly unhappy, Bombardier has warned that redundancies in Derby will follow quickly, even though the factory has been at full stretch to meet a number of contracts, including supplying 200 carriages for London Underground by 2014.
Economic nationalism has, understandably, raised its head – particularly in the wake of chancellor George Osborne’s Budget Day pledge that he wanted the words “made in Britain, created in Britain, designed in Britain, [and] invented in Britain to drive our nation forward”.
However, the arguments are not just the complaints of sore losers, since railway investment is set to rise rapidly in the years ahead.
Crossrail in London is under way, while David Cameron wants to build a bitterly contested high- speed line from London to the north of England.
Supporting a journey to London by angry local politicians, John Forkin, managing director of Marketing Derby, said: “This is not just a Derby issue, it is a UK issue – we are looking at the end of rail manufacturing in the UK.“
He added: “In France, 100 per cent of trains are built in France, in Germany 90 per cent are built in Germany – in the UK it will soon be zero per cent and every train, tram and tube in the future will need to be imported.”
Derby, however, is not just worried about the 2,300 permanent and 700 contract jobs at Litchurch Lane, since 20,000 more in the midlands who supply parts to Bombardier could be endangered if it does not find new contracts quickly.
Bombardier, however, has had some good news, winning the largest-ever resignalling contract offered by London Underground, mostly on the Metropolitan Line – but none of this work will be of use to the carriage-builders in Litchurch Lane.
Privately, Whitehall is grateful that Bombardier management has been relatively diplomatic in the way that it has expressed disappointment at the defeat – although the Canadians have announced the dreaded “review” of its UK operations.
Four of the Derby factory’s five UK train manufacturing contracts – two for National Express, one for London Midland and the other for London Underground’s Victoria Line – will be completed by September, while another London Underground contract will finish in late 2014.
Defending the decision not to give them the contract, transport minister Theresa Villiers said Siemens had offered the “best value for money for taxpayers”, while 2,000 manufacturing and maintenance jobs would follow.
Some of the figures bandied about, though, have to be treated with some caution.
Two years ago, the Department of Transport claimed for a while that the Hitachi contract would safeguard 12,500 jobs – although claims on such a scale are not made today.
Hitachi now promises 500 jobs in Tyne and Wear in the job-starved northeast of England, but trades unionists and others argue that these will be left with the task of assembling high-tech equipment built by better-paid, better-protected Hitachi and Siemens’ staff elsewhere.
The first of the Siemens-built Thameslink carriages will be delivered in 2015. Three hundred of the jobs will come to Hebburn in Tyneside, although workers there will make components for carriages that will be manufactured in Siemens’s plant in Krefeld in Germany.
Unhappy, Bob Crow, general secretary of the militant RMT transport union, said: “We are being fobbed off with a deal which will only create a minimal number of component jobs in Tyne and Wear with the trains themselves built in Germany.”
