Bombardier

Jennifer_Jane

MRSTITTLEMOUSE wrote: »

Hardly racist,just a fact.
Time does'nt erase facts.
I hardly think bed bugs compare with the point the poster was making either considering Zyklon B was designed for fumigating vermin.
I think you are the one being racist if you consider bedbugs comparible to human beings and just as worthy of fumigation in the same way as a bed bug.

We are going off topic here, but felt this couldn't go unchallenged. I don't think it was Siemens Engineering who were responsible for Zyklon B insecticide. Your post is completely unnecessary. Of course there is no comparison with bedbugs and human beings. If the word 'zyklon' simply means 'cyclone' in German (I didn't know that), then you can understand Germans using the word more readily than we would. For most of the world, the word remains - and should remain - a reminder of the great, unimaginable, evil of the Holocaust, but if I was buying a Siemens Cyclone vacuum cleaner, or even a domestic gas oven, it would never have occurred to me to tie this up with the Zyklon B horror.

adouglasmhor

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish wrote: »

Please correct me if I wrong , Is it the same Siemens That were involved in this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2233890.stm .

Then again, after the Tory campaign of 1979 " Labour isn`t working " , old Thatch managed to take unemployment up to 3 million .

What a stupid story, it's only German for Cyclone. Do we stop using the word hurricane in case we offend people from Dresden? Stop using the word corporate in case the Argentinians get a strop on? Do we bollox.

There's a Siemens street in in Glasgow, been there for years.

tyllwyd

Bombardier has won a big UK signalling contract recently.

http://www.railwaygazette.com/nc/news/single-view/view/bombardier-awarded-london-underground-sub-surface-lines-signalling-contract.html

John_Pierpoint

I do enjoy the trolls on here.

I hope at my senior citizen age I have managed to realise that homo sapiens and bed bugs are different organisms - I expect we will have a virus protection society soon or a "bring back smallpox" for a better world pressure group.

I thought we are EU citizens now.

I expect that Siemens, having failed to get the latest Chinese high speed train contract, decided it just must grab the UK offering.

Speaking as someone who probably shares 50% of his DNA with a bed bug, anyone noticed that Bombardier is sort of more "foreign" being Canadian owned.

What has this country not sold off to financial engineering?

John.

PS God damn it those Chinese seem to be able to do their own telecomms for the new railway too.
I wonder if that is something to do with producing more engineering graduates in a year than we can produce in a generation? (Is that true - I've just made it up?). Carry on dreaming of instant wealth and fame watching the X-factor, while the "workshop of the world" moves to Asia.

Click Telstone in the listings below:

http://www.answers.com/topic/telestone-technologies-corp

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/reverse-merger-chinese-based-companies-to-caution.html/

Rochdale_Pioneers

There seem to be a lot of assumptions being made here that are wrong.

1. Bombardier are shedding 1,400 jobs. Don't blame me says Hammond, they wrote to me and said they were cutting 1,200 jobs regardless. Yes Phillip, due to the 800+ day gap between train orders placed by your department
2. Siemens are indeed creating 2,000 new jobs. However, only 300 of these are engineering. The other 1,700 are to run the new maintenance depots which will house the new fleet, and will see job losses at depots which maintain the existing fleet. As the contract was on a build and maintain basis, Bombardier would also have been creating new jobs. Cleaning a train at night is not comparable with the engineer who built it
3. Bombardier are currently building Electrostar trains for National Express. They have just built some Electrostar trains for Southern which have been immediately sub-let to Thameslink. There is absolutely nothing at all stopping Hammond from ordering a large add-on to the order. The 5 years he claims would be needed to cancel with Siemens is rubbish when the train from Bombardier is not only already in production but has become pretty much the modern standard as so many Networker/Turbostar/Electrostar vehicles have been built since the mid 90s
4. And setting aside the Thameslink order why have there been no trains ordered for more than 2 years? Because of privatisation. And because of privatisation the fleets of Bombardier trains built over the last decade have been too short and too small a fleet. There is urgent need to order additional vehicles of the existing design to augment fleets of various operators. You wouldn't tender this out as only the original manufacturer can add new centre vehicles to existing trains. So instead of spending all this money putting skilled engineers on the dole, why not pay them to build the trains we so desperately need?

angrypirate

Rochdale_Pioneers wrote: »

There seem to be a lot of assumptions being made here that are wrong.

1. Bombardier are shedding 1,400 jobs. Don't blame me says Hammond, they wrote to me and said they were cutting 1,200 jobs regardless. Yes Phillip, due to the 800+ day gap between train orders placed by your department
2. Siemens are indeed creating 2,000 new jobs. However, only 300 of these are engineering. The other 1,700 are to run the new maintenance depots which will house the new fleet, and will see job losses at depots which maintain the existing fleet. As the contract was on a build and maintain basis, Bombardier would also have been creating new jobs. Cleaning a train at night is not comparable with the engineer who built it
3. Bombardier are currently building Electrostar trains for National Express. They have just built some Electrostar trains for Southern which have been immediately sub-let to Thameslink. There is absolutely nothing at all stopping Hammond from ordering a large add-on to the order. The 5 years he claims would be needed to cancel with Siemens is rubbish when the train from Bombardier is not only already in production but has become pretty much the modern standard as so many Networker/Turbostar/Electrostar vehicles have been built since the mid 90s
4. And setting aside the Thameslink order why have there been no trains ordered for more than 2 years? Because of privatisation. And because of privatisation the fleets of Bombardier trains built over the last decade have been too short and too small a fleet. There is urgent need to order additional vehicles of the existing design to augment fleets of various operators. You wouldn't tender this out as only the original manufacturer can add new centre vehicles to existing trains. So instead of spending all this money putting skilled engineers on the dole, why not pay them to build the trains we so desperately need?

Other than the fact that this would have been seen by the EU as illiegitimate protectionism by the UK, great idea - why didnt the Labour government think of that when they put it out to tender? The current government could not suddenly cancel it then awarded an extension without going through the bidding process. Maybe its time for you to take those labour tinted glasses off and see the real government who screwed over these workers.

And also i expect the majority of the people facing redundancy are probably mechanics - very different to engineers (i am a professional chartered engineer so find the suggestion of calling a guy in overalls working with an adjustable spanner an engineer quite infuriating)

Rochdale_Pioneers

angrypirate wrote: »

Other than the fact that this would have been seen by the EU as illiegitimate protectionism by the UK, great idea - why didnt the Labour government think of that when they put it out to tender? The current government could not suddenly cancel it then awarded an extension without going through the bidding process. Maybe its time for you to take those labour tinted glasses off and see the real government who screwed over these workers.

Thats nice. The lawyers on the radio yesterday specialising in EU law disagree (the rules allowing for whatever you define them to be including choosing a tender on grounds of aesthetics) but I'm sure you are right. And you completely miss the point - the order would be for additional vehicles to be inserted into Electrostar EMUs manufactured by Bombardier. You cannot tender this out as only Bombardier can build vehicles for Bombardier trains. Currently Alstom are building additional vehicles for the Pendolino trains - this was ordered direct with no competitive tendering.

You are of course right that Labour tendered for these trains. Unless Lord Adonis is an expert in contract law I'd suggest that they were drawn up by the very same civil servants now doing the same job for the Tories. Nor did Labour go to the Bombardier plant and promise jobs and work - half of the 800 day order hiatus has been under the Tories, half under Labour. When Labour weren't ordering trains its because they'd just ordered a large number which Bombardier were busy building. When the Tories weren't ordering Trains the manufacturer wrote to them saying unless you order something we're going to slash jobs then close.

There is quite literally nothing else in the pipeline to be ordered in the next few years - unless add-on orders are placed to lengthen existing trains. Bombardier will close, we'll lose the expertese, then Alstom, Siemens and CAF can charge what they like for what will be bespoke orders for our restrictive loading gauge.

Really2

Just out of interest, was the same fuss made about labour by the same users back in 2009?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/13/government-train-contract-unions-derby

The government was accused by trade union leaders yesterday of failing to safeguard UK jobs after awarding a £7.5bn trains contract to a Japanese-led consortium.

Could that one not be part of the reason they are making redundancies also?

Just a thought?

Rochdale_Pioneers

It should have been, but with the promise of a new factory to build IEP they were too busy fighting over whose constituency it would be built it. And its more an assembly plant than factory, fitting out vehicles built in Japan. Hitachi insist they are in it for the long term and will build future trains for Europe in the UK. Except its a long way to Europe from Newton Aycliffe, and vehicles built for export would have to go by road as they'll be out of gauge.

But the true farce on the Hitachi order is what's been ordered. Department for Transport mandarins keep changing the spec from one stupid unworkable idea to another. This farce started under Labour and have continued unchecked under the Tories. As with so many things Sir Humphrey transcends political boundaries, which is why Hammond blaming Labour ministers for the same idiotic civil servants still running the DfT was so silly.

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

What a cheap racist gibe - I've got a cyclone vacuum cleaner. I must remember to hide it, along with the piggy bank next time a friend with strange religious proclivities comes to visit.

ICI used to supply Zyklon B to the LCC for the fumigating of London's East End homes.

I wonder how many complaints there were about the death of the bed bugs.

Don`t you dare patronise me . It certainly was not a cheap racist jibe . Being partly Jewish , I find your remark very insulting .Maybe you are a someone who denies the holocaust . Visiting the Ravensbruck monument in Amsterdam was a very moving experience .

There are facts that cannot be denied . So silly little references to bed bugs is really quite a dumb thing to say.

That camp provided slave labour to said company so it might , just be , something to bear in mind .