6 | Aycliffe Today Business
Hitachi steel is fabricated inside Finley Structures’ factory on Aycliffe Business Park as senior
quantity surveyor Diane Ruston, pictured with operations manager Jim Graham, joins the firm.
HITACHI
CONTRACT
COMES FIRST
FOR FINLEY’S
NEW RECRUIT
Steel firm Finley Structures has
appointed a new senior quantity
surveyor - and her first job is to
work on the high-profile Hitachi
Rail Europe project in Newton
Aycliffe.
Diane Ruston is used to working on largescale construction projects - among other
contracts, she worked for Severfield
Watson Structures, part of the Thirsk-based
Severfield Rowen group, on the 5 Broadgate
development in North London.
The 12-storey building - which includes
13,000 tonnes of steel, more than The
Shard - will provide more than 700,000
sq ft of trading space.
Diane, 30, from York, says she jumped
at the chance to work for Aycliffe-based
family-run firm Finley Structures after
eight years with Severfield.
“The attraction was working for a
family firm, and working in smaller
teams, says Diane, who graduated from
”
Warwick University in 2004 with a degree in
economics.
“I can get more involved in the systems side
of jobs and looking at procedures, and the
opportunity to work on projects like Hitachi’s
train-building factory is fantastic.
”
Darlington firm Shepherd Construction,
the main contractor for the Hitachi project,
handed Finley Structures the task of
constructing the steel frame of the main
factory on the 42,700sqm site at Aycliffe
Business Park earlier this year.
Finley, based within a mile of Merchant Park,
where Hitachi’s new £82m facility is being
built, has also been handed a secondary
steelwork package in a huge contract
involving a total of 2,000 tonnes of steel.
The factory, which will include a research
and development centre, is supporting more
than 200 local jobs in its construction and will
employ 730 people once open by the end of
summer 2015, as well as thousands more in
the supply chain.
Diane added: “At the moment we’re working
on the main shed build, so there’s a lot of
Hitachi steel going through our factory at the
“It’s great to be working on such
a high-profile project straight
away. The Hitachi development is
huge for the area bu Ё