How a 200-year-old British industry hit the buffers

In contrast to the venerable Litchurch Lane site, Newton Aycliffe opened only in 2015 after Hitachi won a mammoth deal to supply express models to replace ageing rolling stock for the East Coast and Great Western main lines.

The plant, located on the route of the original Stockton & Darlington railway that heralded the dawn of the railway age in 1825, has been a key element in the North East’s transformation following the loss of its coal mining and shipbuilding industries.

Consultation on redundancies in the absence of new work will be extensive although Hitachi will seek to hang on to staff for as long as possible, according to sources close to the firm.

To understand how a state-of-the-art plant like Newton Aycliffe could be fighting for survival so soon after opening it’s necessary to go back to the days of UK rail privatisation in the 1990s.

Undertaken in the twilight years of Conservative rule under John Major, after many other public assets had already been sold off, privatisation was followed by a surge in passenger numbers as annual journeys more than doubled over two decades.

That growth spurred hitherto unknown levels of investment in a new generation of trains that created plenty of business for factories. Manufacturers were themselves newly privatised, triggering a flurry of foreign takeovers.

Yet even during the heyday of new orders, the tender process was tortuous. The industry found itself a victim of boom and bust cycles, with gluts of orders followed by the sort of long droughts that sometimes prove fatal.

York Carriage Works, which was acquired by ABB and later US-based Thrall, closed in 1996. Alstom’s site at Washwood Heath in the Midlands, where the West Coast Main Line’s fleet of tilting Pendolino trains was completed, shut in 2005.

They joined major railway works in towns such as Crewe, Doncaster and Swindon that had already been consigned to history.

Litchurch Lane first faced the threat of closure in 2011 following the award of a £1.6bn Thameslink contract to Germany’s Siemens in 2011. The decision left Litchurch chronically short of work.

The Department for Transport claimed that handing the contract to the German manufacturer represented the best value for money for taxpayers. However, union leaders branded the move “disgraceful” at the time, saying the Government had failed to take into account the importance of job creation and preserving Britain’s manufacturing base.

Hundreds of jobs were cut at Litchurch Lane as a result of the decision, with the short-term future of the site only secured in 2014 after it was awarded a £1.3bn contract to supply train cars for the Crossrail route, later renamed the Elizabeth Line.

The last-gasp nature of the reprieve strikes at the heart of why train makers have struggled since privatisation: the lumpy nature of the tender process has left manufacturers lurching between feast and famine, unable to properly plan for the future.

“It has now been well over a thousand days since a significant mainline rolling stock order was placed, despite an urgent need for new trains across the network,” says Caplan.

The RIA, which represents 350 firms across the supply chain, says that annual tenders for 500 vehicles – fewer than have been issued in some years since privatisation – would be sufficient to guarantee a healthy UK train-making sector and end the boom-bust cycle.