THUMBING through the pages of The Railway Observer, for many years amongst the locomotive fleet changes, there have been frequent references to the happenings at the Brush Works at Loughborough including a credit to ‘our Brush correspondent’.
While the RO column reported on the locomotives present it rarely betrayed much about the daily production challenges and politics associated with every large company. Even the history of the company itself is far from straightforward.
Brush Traction, as a division of Brush Electrical Machines, changed to a company in its own right and weathered the demise of Hawker Siddeley to pass into BTR ownership, then FKI and Melrose. Such changes saw Brush Traction survive them whereas some other Brush companies did not. Now under Wabtec control, the name (Brush Traction) was retained, albeit as a sub-title, and the site occupied by Brush Traction within the Falcon Works were placed under a 25 year unbreakable lease in 2011.