Bringing Aycliffe Business Park Together | 5
WELCOME
FOREWORD By Darren Cumner, Hitachi Rail Europe
Welcome to the SeptemberOctober issue of Aycliffe Today
Business – which is, as usual,
packed with lots of interesting
news and features from around
Aycliffe Business Park.
The Hitachi Rail Europe development here
is on schedule, with the main contractors
Shepherd Construction on track for an
Autumn 2015 handover.
The landscape of the site itself is changing
every day and a lot of developments have
been made in the last few months.
Network Rail has started work on the 1km
test track, while our head count has reached
26 now.
We’re actually starting to out-grow our
temporary offices at the Xcel Centre so
we’ve been looking for additional space on
the business park, and I’m delighted to say
we’ve taken some offices at South West
Durham Training (SWDT).
We’ve had some very productive
negotiations with SWDT recently which
has brought about a number of exciting
developments.
We’ll be working very closely with them on
Apprentices this year, and we’ve agreed to
invest £1m in a prototype train, which will be
housed at SWDT, for young trainers to work
on. This will give them and us an obvious
advantage if they already have experience of
working on the trains before they join us.
With SWDT being just around the corner,
and the fact we’ll have office space there
until o