TSC to look into UK Rolling Stock Procurement

This from the Transport Select Committee...

13 July 2011
For Immediate Release: SCA 76/2010–12

UK ROLLING STOCK PROCUREMENT – ORAL EVIDENCE SESSION

Wednesday 7 September 2011

Committee Room 15, House of Commons

Following the recent choice of Siemens Plc as the Government’s preferred bidder for the supply of the new Thameslink trains, the Transport Committee will be taking oral evidence on Wednesday 7 September at 9.35am from ministers and other key stakeholders to discuss matters related to UK rolling stock procurement.

The Committee will question witnesses about the recent Thameslink announcement and broader issues related to the way that rolling stock is procured in the UK.

These timings are approximate and the session may start slightly earlier or later than advertised. The room the session takes place in may also change. Please check our website for up to date details of this session.

- ENDS -

Pointless signs - Bolton

This from a Mr Oi!

£4M has been spent on refurbishing Bolton Station.


Although it seems the budget didn’t quite stretch to removing the residual detritus of a long-dead business!

Lookalike - Nice... but dim?

This from the recently published CRESC Research Report: How not to build trains...

But what has happened now, with the train crash at Bombardier?

The public debate about the Siemens Thameslink contract reveals that like Hugh Grant, the Coalition ministers and civil servants who make industrial policy uneasily sense that something is wrong.

But the problem is not simply that the micro-economic answers aren’t answers, though this, of course, is true.

More profoundly, the problem is the long reign of micro-economic question framing in the Whitehall centres of policy making, in the broadsheet media, and in the economics departments of the ancient universities.

These distinct spheres are of course densely interconnected, not least through elite careers. Many of the best and brightest undergraduates may now choose the City, but the BIS and Treasury middle ranks are still heavily populated with Oxbridge recruits and those trying to pass as such.

Indeed.