Why we're all waiting for a call from Thrall

DON'T be surprised that the future of York wagon maker Thrall Europa, known nowadays as Trinity Thrall, is on the agenda for discussion by the City of York Council tonight.

ABB carriageworks struggled in vain for survival on that same site in Holgate Park - and councillors will want to do everything possible to stave off a repeat of that situation.

Yet Thrall bosses were today remaining strangely - some might say, unnervingly - silent over what is being perceived as a hazy future. No one in charge at the Holgate Park plant seems to be able, or willing, to say where the U.S.-based firm's next major order is coming from, once its five-year deal with rail operator EWS for 2,500 wagons runs out in July.

By then a bow will also have been tied on the £40 million contract Thrall shared with Wabtec Rail, of Doncaster, to provide Railtrack with 490 ballast and aggregate wagons. But even though York MP Hugh Bayley, who has spoken to Thrall management, confirms that the wagon-maker "badly needs a new order", phone messages from the Evening Press to factory manager Jim McFadyen and to Thrall headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, remain unanswered.

The silence is sad because if problems do lie ahead, everyone wants to help. That same powerful community co-operation which in 1998 rallied to ensure that Thrall Europa could set up on the site of the ill-fated ABB engineering works, could again easily spring into action.

Remember the huge energy beamed into a York Regeneration Partnership Board which considered the future of the Holgate Park-site after the collapse there of ABB in 1997?

The partnership consisted of the City of York Council, the former North Yorkshire Training and Enterprise Council, the Home Housing Association, the English Partnership Government agency, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, trade unions, the Chamber of Commerce and members of the community. By linking arms and aims - and with a £3.5 million Government contribution towards an estimated £23.5 million bill to redevelop the whole of the 48 acres of then-defunct trackside tract at Holgate Park - they got things done.

Armed with the facts, a similar consortium could exert huge pressure on the Government to speed up its road-to-rail freight policies and stop the logjam which has resulted because Railtrack has concentrated more on passenger lines than freight, thereby dampening the promised demand on which so many hopes - and manufacturing orders - are now pinned.

The Government has a big stake in ensuring that Thrall succeeds. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott himself formally opened the Holgate Park factory, and only last October its importance was endorsed when the Duke of York, in his new role as special ambassador for trade and industry, visited the carriageworks.

Instead, Tony Bennett, assistant director of economic development at City of York Council is still waiting to learn the details from the company, and U.S. agents of Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, continue to seek clarification from parent company HQ.

The silence is inexplicable, considering how ways were found to dip into the public purse to help Thrall make a good start.

For instance, the York Regeneration Partnership earmarked £950,000 to refurbish the Thrall buildings, and up to £50,000 of public funds were set aside to help Thrall with recruitment.

What began as Thrall's European headquarters - a York-based conduit into the Common Market - gradually seemed to become more marginalised as time went on. Early in 2000, Thrall Car of Chicago announced that a new headquarters would be found somewhere in western Europe - and that it had acquired two crucial operations in central Europe, with Thrall Europa operating the freight wagons operations and metals business of CKDF Vagonka Studnka in the Czech Republic. Thrall's other new operation was Rail Project, a design-engineering firm in Poprad, Slovakia.

This was bound to pose the question - what now for Thrall at York, given the need for new orders and the high unit costs caused by a strong pound, compared with the relatively cheap labour of eastern Europe?

But there was to come another, even bigger wave of uncertainty which broke on the other side of the Atlantic last August, as mega-giant conglomerate Trinity, of Dallas, Texas, announced that it was swallowing up Thrall in one $165 million gulp (plus 7.15 million shares of its common stock to Thrall shareholders) and merging it into Trinity's $1.3 billion railcar business.

And guess what? Trinity already has no fewer than three well-developed eastern European railcar manufacturing and engineering operations poised to take advantage of the European Union and the Euro.

No one wants to see a repeat of the disasters of ABB, or the sudden, wrenching departure of the Samsung heavy engineering site at Flaxby Moor in November, 1997, by orders from a remote office in Korea. In both instances vast amounts of public investment was lost in an instant. No one wants to see the further whittling down of manufacturing in York or for that matter Britain.

So the first question everyone wants to ask the bosses at Thrall and the heads of the corporate giant Trinity is not "who is to blame?" but quite simply - how can we help? And if you are not in trouble, tell us why and let's celebrate.

Either way, talk to us.

Updated: 08:59 Tuesday, March 05, 2002