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ADVERTORIAL
It was more than six years ago that HÜBNER UK set up a UK base. One of its founders, John Blackham, explains more about how it has gone and what the future holds
Building relationships for the long haul
T
here’s a right way, a wrong way and a railway. That’s what John Blackham was told as a British Railways’ apprentice in the 1980s. “The UK railways is a wonderful, unique culture of a very wide-ranging set of organisations that deliver everything from the entertainment side of the business, right through to high tech, high risk, high cost engineering assets and that is a hell of a spread under one organisation,” he said. John is an important cog in that wheel as Managing Director of HÜBNER UK and Vice President Global After Sales & Service HÜBNER Group Mobility Rail. The organisation specialises in the supply, replacement, refurbishment, and repair of vehicle gangways systems for the service sector of the UK’s rolling stock. This includes project support for new vehicle sales in gangways, windows and rubber product system solutions. “HÜBNER is a leading global supplier of complete gangways and articulation systems for railway vehicles with a proven track record of longevity and good performance,” said John. “Our assets speak for themselves with really good longterm lifecycle performances. There’s not many
elastomer-based products that you can put through the environment our products are put through every day for 20 years and still remain intact. “The product is well engineered with proven performance and because of continuous reinvestment, we’ve gone on and engineered improvements, driven by the passion of an ongoing engineering improvement culture embedded within the organisation to give better and better life cycle cost. “Being based in the Midlands we are here to stay and here to support new construction as well, with a wide-ranging portfolio of products now in rail, ranging from touch screen human-machine interface in drivers’ cabs for auxiliary control systems, through to gangways and bogie products. There’s lots of different things in rail that we are doing and that is all part of us being committed to this as an industry and in not being a one solution type provider.” The UK base of the business is a newer element of the organisation, which globally has been around for nearly 80 years. It was the idea of John, who saw an opportunity to set up in the UK and not operate out of Germany, an idea which was implemented more than six years ago.
The government has got to seize the initiative and drive it. We need a proper strategy and a whole industry strategic plan
December 2023
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