A Japanese company has won Britain’s biggest order for intercity trains, defeating a rival bidder that owns this country’s only train factory.

Most of the manufacturing jobs are likely to go to Japan, with the bodies and engines shipped to Britain for assembly. The Government said that the contract would “create or safeguard” 12,500 jobs, but Hitachi, the manufacturer, said that it could employ as few as 200 people at a new assembly plant.
The Department for Transport chose Hitachi instead of a consortium involving Bombardier, which employs 2,200 people in Derby. Its factory has only enough orders to employ that number of staff until next year and may have to make redundancies.
The trains will replace the 30-year-old InterCity 125s promoted in the British Rail “This is the age of the train” adverts that featured Sir Jimmy Savile.
Hitachi’s trains will be up to 17 per cent lighter, use 15 per cent less energy and will accelerate more rapidly, cutting journeys from London to Edinburgh by 12 minutes. The carriages will be 3 meters longer than the ones that they replace, allowing an extra 100 seats to be fitted to each train. The first 70 carriages will be manufactured entirely in Japan and will enter passenger service on the East Coast Main Line in 2013.
The total order is for up to 1,400 carriages and the remainder will be put together at a plant to be built at Sheffield, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, or Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. The bodies of all the carriages will be built in Japan, as will key parts of the engines and bogies.
Hitachi said that it was “in active discussions with 20 carefully selected high-quality UK suppliers.” But Alistair Dormer, the company’s UK manager, said that it was not obliged to use any of them. “I don’t think we can stipulate, under UK procurement law, where in the EU things should be procured or built,” he said. Mr. Dormer added that the assembly plant would employ between 200 and 500 people.
The company claimed that 70 per cent of the value of the £7.5 billion contract would be spent in Britain. At least half the cost is for maintenance of the trains for the next 20 years at depots in Bristol, Reading, Doncaster, Leeds and West London. These depots will replace those that maintain the 125 fleet and it is unclear how many jobs will be created.
Lord Adonis, the Transport Minister, said that the figure of 12,500 jobs created or safeguarded included an assumption that each direct job created four more among suppliers. Asked whether the majority of the workforce making the trains would be in Britain, he said: “A substantial proportion of those jobs will be British.”
He said he hoped that Hitachi’s assembly plant would attract orders from elsewhere in Europe and emulate the success of Japanese car plants established in Britain in the 1990s.
(Source: Times Online)