03-08-2025
Britain's biggest train factory raises the alarm over nationalised rail
The boss of Britain's biggest train factory has warned its future will be under threat if Labour's nationalisation of the railway delays the award of vital contracts.
Rob Whyte, managing director of Alstom UK, said it was crucial that a pipeline of promised government orders for new trains was set out as soon as possible.
Mr Whyte, 48, said he was concerned about the impact of the nascent Great British Railways (GBR) on the process, with Alstom's historic Litchurch Lane plant desperate for new work.
He said: 'I'm nervous at the moment. In all honesty, I'm nervous. It's going to take a little while before GBR is fully up and running. And we can't afford to wait, our critical period is next year.'
Workers at Litchurch Lane are commencing the assembly of the last 10 trains in its existing order book.
The Derby site, the biggest and oldest train factory in the country, spanning 90 acres and dating to 1840, is already down to just 600 engineers from approaching 2,000 five years ago.
Mr Whyte, who joined Alstom more than 30 years ago as an apprentice, said he could not guarantee that Litchurch Lane would survive without new work in the long run.
He said: 'The risk is always there. We cannot afford to keep an empty factory. So we try to make it really clear to people why it's important with GBR to have that clear and visible pipeline.
'There are some things we can do ourselves, doing modernisation-type activity, a level of work which can keep the right number of people employed to keep the site alive.
'But I need new rolling stock to come to keep my engineers occupied and to keep the factory busy.'
'Politicians love to meddle in railways'
Around half of the 6,000 workers across Paris-based Alstom's 30 or so UK locations are now devoted to servicing trains previously built by the group.
A further 25pc are engaged in upgrading existing rolling stock. Only a small fraction are actively building trains.
Though GBR will also be based in Derby, a stone's throw from Litchurch Lane, Mr Whyte said he was not counting on proximity to ease the path to new orders.
He said: 'That's not a guarantee of anything. Everyone has an opinion of what they want. They all want the same thing, but then want to change it.
'Politicians love to meddle in railways, but they're on a five-year cycle. We're on a 40-year-plus cycle, which is the lifespan of a train. And when you're talking about infrastructure you're on a 100-year-plus cycle.'
Mr Whyte, who began his Alstom career in Stafford and went on to run the manufacturing giant's Nordic operations for eight years, took over at the UK business in February.
This weekend he spoke at the Greatest Gathering, an assembly of 140 steam, diesel and electric locomotives, high-speed trains and commuter units at Litchurch Lane, held to mark the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington railway, the first in the world.
Tickets have been capped at 40,000 for safety reasons though Alstom reckons it could have sold five times that number.
Mr Whyte said that while railways will still be around in another 200 years 'unless we invent teleportation', the future of train-making in the country that invented them was less certain.
Once Litchurch Lane has completed the last 10 Aventra trains for London's Elizabeth Line – a top-up order handed to the plant last year after it began making staff redundant – there is no new work until it begins making 225mph expresses for High Speed 2 (HS2).
The HS2 trains, which will be built with Hitachi, Alstom's biggest UK rival, are slated to begin testing in 2030. However, the Government said in June that the opening of the line would be delayed beyond the target date of 2033, providing no new deadline.
With HS2 engaged in a programme reset under a chairman who joined last month, Mr Whyte said it was inevitable that the launch would be pushed back towards the end of next decade.
Even when it arrives, the HS2 order, while worth £2bn, is for only 54 trains, supporting relatively few jobs at Litchurch Lane.
Mr Whyte said: 'It will be an amazing product, but it's a limited number of trains. It's not 500. If your job is putting in seats, there are not as many of them as in a contract for the Piccadilly Line.'
Alstom's immediate priority is targeting contracts to supply trains to Northern, TransPennine and Southeastern, though given the size of Litchurch Lane, sustaining jobs on a contract by contract basis is not tenable in the longer term.
Mr Whyte said: 'We win one contract, amazing, everything is great. But we immediately have to think about what follows that, because we are very big and we need to be working on more than one at a time.'
Exporting British rail
An added complication is that, having been the first in the world, the UK railway is particularly idiosyncratic, with a different gauge and tighter bridge and platform clearances. It means that trains suitable here cannot generally be shipped abroad.
Litchurch Lane's export successes – such as Johannesburg's Gautrain and the Cairo monorail – have generally involved networks built from scratch.
At the same time, recent governments have insisted that in order to win contracts companies must establish a significant level of production in the UK. It has led Hitachi, Siemens and CAF of Spain to establish factories here, creating intense competition in a limited market.
When orders do come, they can be accompanied by onerous demands.
Mr Whyte said: 'Some of the terms and conditions are eye-watering. People expect that each time we should be striving for higher and higher reliability and capacity. And they're pegging that to us, yet holding back on price.'
He added: 'At the end of the day my biggest competitor is not Hitachi or Siemens. It's my colleague in Italy who, when I'm looking for investment internally, can show a stronger order pipeline and a workable set of terms and conditions.'
Mr Whyte said France, Alstom's home country, retained an appreciation for the railway industry and manufacturing that Britain lost years ago.
He said: 'The TGV was, is and probably always will be a symbol of France. That and nuclear power were their two showcases to the world.
'We used to do that. We invented the railway and we gave it to the world. Then we all got a bit embarrassed and if we spoke about rail it was about soggy sandwiches or whatever.
'We went down a rabbit hole and we lost our way. I really hope that's what GBR is going to bring back.'
A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'We are committed to supporting the entire rail manufacturing sector, which will play a key role in our generational reform of the railways.
'That's why the Spending Review committed to a major programme of infrastructure enhancements, while work has already started on developing a brand-new strategy for rolling stock that will help overcome challenges in the supply chain, ahead of the formation of Great British Railways.'
