GEC Traction Limited was a British industrial company formed in 1972 which designed and manufactured electric traction equipment for railway rolling stock. The company had manufacturing sites at Manchester, Preston and Sheffield and was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric Company.
The company's pedigree is traced back to a long list of British companies involved in railway traction almost to the start of the railway age in the first half of the 19th century.[2][pageneeded] Included among the predecessor companies[3] are the following:
The immediate history stemmed from the 1968 acquisition of Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) by GEC. In the following year GEC merged with (took over) the English Electric (EE), thus bringing together the two previously rival companies, AEI and EE, under single ownership. From this, in 1969, a new subsidiary company was born, English Electric-AEI Traction Ltd. This new organisation slowly integrated the traction divisions of AEI and EE, culminating in 1972 when the company was renamed GEC Traction Ltd. Also added to the company was the Industrial Locomotive Division of the former English Electric which was based at Vulcan Works, Newton-le-Willows (this later became a separate company, GEC Industrial Locomotives Ltd).
The company that became GEC Traction Ltd. was originally incorporated on 6 May 1927.
In June 1973, the Company celebrated "150 years in Motive Power" dating from the establishment of the first company in the world specifically created for the design and manufacture of railway locomotives, Robert Stephenson & Company in Newcastle.
For the greater part of the 18 years in which the Company existed under the name GEC Traction, it was the leading supplier of traction equipment in the UK and also had sales around the world, particularly in South Africa, Australasia, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Employment across the three sites totalled 3,500. In 1984, largely as a result of a cutback in orders by South African Railways, the Attercliffe Common works at Sheffield was closed, with the rotating machines business being absorbed at Preston and gear manufacture at GEC Machines, Rugby.
In April 1989, the company was conferred with the Queen's Awards for Enterprise in the field of electronic railway propulsion equipment. A few weeks thereafter, a merger was agreed between the power and transport businesses of GEC and those of Alsthom of France, part of Compagnie Générale d'Electricité (CGE). As a result, GEC Traction became a subsidiary of this newly formed Anglo-French group, GEC Alsthom, and was consequently renamed GEC Alsthom Traction Ltd on 1 July 1989.
As part of a rationalisation of the business the Company was further contracted from 1991 to 1998, with the eventual closing of all activities at Trafford Park in 1998, and the remaining business being concentrated at Preston or transferred to sites in France.
In December 1997, GEC and Alcatel Alsthom of France announced a flotation of their joint venture on the Paris stock exchange, to comprise 52% of the share capital, with each of the partners reducing to 24% of the shares each. The company was successfully floated in June 1998 and changed to the simpler name, Alstom. GEC and Alcatel subsequently sold their remaining stakes. All references to the 'GEC' name and branding were removed from the ex-GEC businesses which remained in Alstom. GEC Alsthom Traction Ltd became Alstom Traction Ltd on 22 June 1998 and the company name survived to 19 August 2008, although increasingly integrated within the Transport division of Alstom.
The Alstom Transport factory at Preston was the last site of the former GEC Traction to remain open, albeit on a much reduced scale to that in the 1970s and 1980s. Having suffered around 500 job losses in August 2003, the Preston site was reported to be employing "around 240 people" in October 2010,[4] and 180 people in October 2017.
In June 2017, Alstom announced that the Preston Strand Road site would close and be vacated by June 2018, and operations would be transferred to Alstom's new facility at Widnes (traction equipment engineering and production, and AC motors), terminated (DC motor repair and overhaul) or outsourced (logistics).[5] Alstom activities on the Preston site finished on 31 July 2018; BAE Systems continue to have offices on the site and St Modwen, the site owner, is attempting to find a tenant for the vacated area.
Sited on a 127-acre complex to the south of Westinghouse Road and shared with other member companies of the GEC Power Engineering Group, this former Metropolitan Vickers and AEI site had the administrative headquarters of the company as well as manufacturing facilities. The site specialised in all types of traction control equipment.
In 1990 (date to be confirmed) the former Low Voltage Switchgear site at Trafford Park (West Works) was renovated to be the new manufacturing facility for GEC Alsthom Traction, with an electronics workshop, machine shop and plating baths and assembly shop for switchgear, equipment cases and power modules. This building was vacated in 1998 when power modules and switchgear was moved to Tarbes in southwest France.
Previously an English Electric Co site, and originally The Dick Kerr Works from 1901, GEC Traction occupied West Works (11 acres on the west side of Strand Road) from 1968. Both traction control equipment and rotating machines (motors, generators and auxiliary machines) were manufactured.
In 1994 under GEC-Alsthom, the main entrance was changed to the Dock side of the site off the newly formed 'Channel Way'. The site was sold off by Alstom in 2002 but immediately leased back by the company with Alstom stating that they had right of occupancy at least until 2018.[6][7]
The site remained open as part of Alstom's service business for the manufacture, repair and overhaul of traction control equipment and rotating machines, and as a spare parts distribution centre, until July 2018. BAE Systems have occupied part of the site since 2006 as tenants of Alstom, and then from August 2018, of St Modwen; a return to Strand Road for BAE Systems who had closed their site there in 1990.
This 9-acre site had specialised in traction rotating machine and gears production since 1923, latterly as an AEI factory before the formation of the company. The site was closed in 1984 and redeveloped, leaving little remaining to identify the original factory.
Related Research Articles
Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of General Electric Company (GEC). It was demerged from GEC and bought by British Aerospace (BAe) on 30 November 1999 to form BAE Systems. GEC then renamed itself Marconi plc.
North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the administrative counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of 7,052,000 in 2011. It is the third-most-populated region in the United Kingdom, after the South East and Greater London. The largest settlements are Manchester and Liverpool.
The General Electric Company (GEC) was a major British industrial conglomerate involved in consumer and defence electronics, communications, and engineering. The company was founded in 1886, was Britain's largest private employer with over 250,000 employees in the 1980s, and at its peak in the 1990s, made profits of over £1 billion a year.
Alstom is a French multinational rolling stock manufacturer which operates worldwide in rail transport markets. It is active in the fields of passenger transportation, signaling, and locomotives, producing high-speed, suburban, regional and urban trains along with trams.
The English Electric Company Limited (EE) was a British industrial manufacturer formed after the armistice of World War I by amalgamating five businesses which, during the war, had been making munitions, armaments and aeroplanes.
Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) was a British holding company formed in 1928 through the merger of the British Thomson-Houston Company (BTH) and Metropolitan-Vickers electrical engineering companies. In 1967 AEI was acquired by GEC, to create the UK's largest industrial group. A scandal that followed the acquisition is said to have been instrumental in reforming accounting practices in the UK.
British Thomson-Houston (BTH) was a British engineering and heavy industrial company, based at Rugby, Warwickshire, England. Originally founded to sell products from the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, it soon became a manufacturer using licenses from the American company. They were known primarily for their electrical systems and steam turbines.
Bruce Peebles & Co. Ltd. was an Edinburgh industrial electrical engineering company.
The Vulcan Foundry Limited was an English locomotive builder sited at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire.
The Marconi Company was a British telecommunications and engineering company that did business under that name from 1963 to 1987. Its roots were in the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company founded by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, which underwent several changes in name after mergers and acquisitions. The company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting, eventually becoming one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies. In 1999, its defence equipment manufacturing division, Marconi Electronic Systems, merged with British Aerospace (BAe) to form BAE Systems. In 2006, financial difficulties led to the collapse of the remaining company, with the bulk of the business acquired by the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
Metropolitan-Vickers, Metrovick, or Metrovicks, was a British heavy electrical engineering company of the early-to-mid 20th century formerly known as British Westinghouse. Highly diversified, it was particularly well known for its industrial electrical equipment such as generators, steam turbines, switchgear, transformers, electronics and railway traction equipment. Metrovick holds a place in history as the builders of the first commercial transistor computer, the Metrovick 950, and the first British axial-flow jet engine, the Metropolitan-Vickers F.2. Its factory in Trafford Park, Manchester, was for most of the 20th century one of the biggest and most important heavy engineering facilities in Britain and the world.
British Westinghouse Electrical and Manufacturing Company was a subsidiary of the Pittsburgh, US-based Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. British Westinghouse would become a subsidiary of Metropolitan-Vickers in 1919; and after Metropolitan-Vickers merged with British Thomson-Houston in 1929, it became part of Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) in 1959. Further consolidation saw AEI taken over by GEC in 1967.
The Thomson-Houston Electric Company was a manufacturing company which was one of the precursors of the General Electric company.
Ruston & Hornsby was an industrial equipment manufacturer in Lincoln, England founded in 1918. The company is best known as a manufacturer of narrow and standard gauge diesel locomotives and also of steam shovels. Other products included cars, steam locomotives and a range of internal combustion engines, and later gas turbines. It is now a subsidiary of Siemens.
Paxman is a major British brand of diesel engines. Ownership has changed on a number of occasions since the company's formation in 1865, and the brand is now part of MAN Diesel & Turbo. At its peak, the Paxman works covered 23 acres (9.3 ha) and employed over 2,000 people. Early Paxman diesel engines carried the name Paxman Ricardo.
Brush Electrical Machines is a manufacturer of electrical generators typically for gas turbine and steam turbine driven applications. The main office is based at Loughborough in Leicestershire, UK.
Shanghai Electric is a Chinese multinational power generation and electrical equipment manufacturing company headquartered in Shanghai. The company traces its roots to 1880.
The South African Railways Class Experimental AC of 1978 is an electric locomotive.
Ferguson, Pailin & Co. was an English electrical engineering company based in Higher Openshaw, Manchester. The company was established in 1913, by Samuel Ferguson and George Pailin to manufacture electrical switchgear.
↑ Bradley, Rodger P (1993). Power for the World's Railways, GEC Traction and its predecessors. Yeovil, Somerset: Oxford Publishing Co. ISBN0-86093-413-6.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
