ANOTHER major rail services firm has been lured to York, this time bringing 40 new jobs to the city and confirming its resurgence as a railway capital.

JacksonEve Infrastructure Services announced today that it has set up headquarters in West Offices Station Rise in the City Business Centre, alongside the giant rail companies and infrastructure organisations like Jarvis and Railtrack.

It is offering a broad range of engineering and project management skills to provide a complete services package, at a time when hundreds of millions of pounds is being spent on improving the railway infrastructure.

That will include cable installation, signalling and telecommunications systems, electrical power management, mechanical, electrical, civil engineering and logistics expertise.

This is the third and biggest inward investment by rail firms into York announced over the past three weeks, with the arrival of engineering management company Captiva Rail Group Ltd and technical recruitment firm Technology Resourcing of Guildford.

Two-thirds of the 40 taken on by JacksonEve at York have been recruited locally - a statistic viewed with triumph by the York Inward Investment Board.

"They contacted us last year. They were set on York from the start, because York is a hub of the industry with the likes of GNER, Jarvis, Corus, Arriva and Railtrack being here and we were only too keen to help.

"They managed to find a corner of 'railway land' for themselves at Station Rise and immediately began recruiting - and that is what we are all about."

Trailblazing the company's way into the city was Eve Rail, the rail cable-laying company which in 1999 moved from Leeds to Holgate Villas to work on numerous projects, including the ongoing Leeds First project.

Now it has been absorbed in a merger with its fellow companies Eve NCI, Eve Utilities, and Eve Graham into Jackson Rail - and is starting in a new HQ in York.

Graham Reid, managing director of JacksonEve, whose annual turnover of £65 million is set to zoom to £70 million this year, said: "Sixty per cent of our business is in the rail sector and York is the centre of the rail industry in the north of England.

"We're targeting the network's Eastern Region, and therefore York is the ideal place to develop our business."

Sarah Czarnecki, JacksonEve's business development manager said that the organisation could call on 750 operational staff across the UK "working to the highest environmental and health and safety standards".

Updated: 10:51 Tuesday, April 02, 2002