Train manufacturing at Derby will end forever at the end of January unless new orders are forthcoming, says Alstom UK and Ireland MD Nick Crossfield. Alstom UK is consulting to make 1,330 jobs redundant at its Litchurch Lane facility.
The warning comes in response to a lack of orders, with no confirmed work beyond the first quarter of 2024 (when delivery of 2,500 Aventra electric multiple units ends), after the Department for Transport failed to deliver a promised national rolling stock strategy which would have featured the replacement of older trains.
Giving evidence to the House of Commons Transport Select Committee’s inquiry into rail services and infrastructure, Crossfield was blunt: “In six weeks, we go from an annual output of 650 cars, employing 3,000 people, to zero. That is at the end of January, in six weeks.
“Today, I have the supply chain already showing liquidations. My paint supplier has gone into insolvency. I have a major on-site embedded supplier that provides my wiring looming and employs several hundred people permanently on the site. They have announced this week to their workforce that at the end of January it is done.”
Responding to questions about whether train building could restart, Crossfield said that, Derby could only be an assembly plant - not making components or having UK suppliers.
Setting out the current rolling stock market to MPs, Railway Industry Association Technical Director David Clarke explained that the issue is a gap in orders.
“We highlight three areas: new build trains; the refurbishment of trains, which is sometimes forgotten; and the suppliers to both of those. All those sectors are seeing no new orders,” he said. “There are current orders in the factories, but they are going to run out.”
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Chris Toone - 09/01/2024 17:47
The rundown of railway carriage building in Derby has been going on for over 30 years, different owners passing it between them since BREL died, each owner putting work elsewhere and losing more jobs in Derby each time, it's basically been a carve up. CandW was first to go, no locomotive building since then. Other rail engineering centres in the UK have had the same treatment, why has this happened all political parties have overseen this decimation carried out. The French and most European countries would never outsource this work to foreigners. It is a UK sickness that needs to end not only for railway work either. The UK has lost the plot totally, all I see are people using computers which is the easiest thing to outsource, no one in the newer generation wants to build or manufacture anything nowadays it's abßolutely barmy, university do rubbish degrees in sociology and other rubbish stuff it's been the ruin of this country