INSIDE TRACK-A BUS PLANT FOR BRITAIN?

摘要

It's June 2005 and the well-planned, highly efficient bus building plant on a green field site outside Falkirk is churning out its latest offerings. A school party waits by the gate, anxious to see this strange, if not unique, British production facility. With the latest technology, and the ultimate level of component pre-assembly, the plant meets its design specification in delivering almost twice the throughout per square metre of the factories it replaced. It is the UK bus plant as, apart from a couple of modest facilities remaining elsewhere, it is responsible for the whole of the home build of British buses. Some say this was the inevitable result of the company mergers that took place earlier in the decade. Others that UK bus building had, so far, been little more than a cottage industry compared to the scale and pace of production on the Continent. It seems remarkable, says one commentator, that not long ago there were a dozen plants building buses in this country.