NICK HUGHES, Sales Director of Hitachi, outlined a bright future to the Railway Study Association
Hitachi is a global engineering company that is building a sizeable presence in the UK railway sector. With a long history of railway equipment manufacture in Japan, Hitachi put its toe in the water of the UK market in 1999, with six employees in London bidding for contracts for the replacement of Mk 1 slam door stock.
Those bids did not bear fruit but the company did succeed not long afterwards when a contract was let for Class 395 EMUs for High Speed 1. Several orders have been won since the ‘Javelins’ gained publicity for the role they played in transporting athletes and spectators to the London 2012 Olympic Games. The list of rolling stock delivered and on order is impressive:
■ Southeastern Class 395, 174 cars;
■ Great Western main line Inter-city Express Programme (IEP), 369 cars;
■ East Coast main line IEP, 497 cars;
■ Abellio ScotRail AT200, 234 cars;
■ Great Western Railway AT300, 173 cars;
■ TransPennine Express AT300, 95 cars;
■ Hull Trains AT300, 25 cars.
SIGNALLING TOO
But it is not just trains that Hitachi supplies: the company is keen to assist Network Rail with signalling and control expertise as …
