ONLY eight months short of celebrating 30 years working for the railways, Phil Dobson heard that it was the end of the line.

He was among the bewildered group who had gathered outside Meridian House, the York headquarters of Jarvis PLC, to learn that the collapse of their struggling company had happened.

They were to be among 1,100 employees – 350 of them at York – whose livelihoods were instantly to vanish.

No niceties of pre-redundancy consultation. No “thanks for all you’ve done”.

Phil, 51, of Woodthorpe, York, was shaken to his core. His grandfather, Albert, was a British Rail (BR) blacksmith at the Leeman Road workshops in York.

His dad, Wilfred, was a track machine operator – in charge of ten-ton steam cranes laying and lifting rail and sleepers, plus 60- foot panels of track.

Now the lineage goes on only because his son, Adam, 20, works at Leeman Road as a trackman for Network Rail.

What an irony. It was Network Rail, the Government’s rail infrastructure company, on whose contracts Jarvis had come to rely, which refused a rescue package for the men put to it by Jarvis administrators in desperate overnight talks.

Phil observed: “Network Rail, itself under huge pressure from the Government, is downsizing. In this industry nobody knows any more who to trust at managerial level.”

Who can blame him for sounding bitter? He has a £70,000 mortgage and no immediate prospect of income.

One sour blessing is that Phil has lost only one week’s pay rather than five like most of the other track men. “I was one of those rare people who were paid weekly, rather than monthly, a relic of the days when I was with British Rail.”

He began in the railway industry by cleaning ditches to drain off rainwater from the tracks or clearing mud slips which had blocked the ditches. At that time he was among 188 trackmen at Leeman Road, York.

“When British Rail broke up, and reorganisation whittled down the workforce to just 30, I was among them and chose to stay in York, working at the Leeman Road workshops as a labourer, rather than being forced to move at Holbeck at Leeds,” he said.

But while there, private companies were taking chunks out of BR and his workshops were taken over by Fastline in a management/employee buyout. After a year the company, which specialised in track replacement, was bought out by Jarvis.

“We were always powerless pawns in the grand game and it should have come as no surprise when finally everybody trashed us for their own purposes. Look at the evidence: A couple of years ago there were 5,000 Jarvis workers throughout the UK. Now there are a mere 2,000.”

When Jarvis found itself in trouble because Network Rail had slowed down its five-year programme, it made 450 people redundant, about 50 of them at York.

“In the process the Leeman Road depot was closed and I was transferred to Holbeck at Leeds, back as a trackman. I thanked my lucky stars, but I should have known better.

“I had been offered redundancy but chose instead to go to Holbeck, hoping that things would pick up. Wrong call. The announcement that we were all now being turfed out hit me in the guts bigtime. You just hope you are dreaming this nightmare, but it goes on and on.

“My job prospects in York are nil. My wife worked for 18 years at Rowntree but with health problems she took redundancy last year, so there is hardly any income to speak of.

“I feel betrayed – let down by the Government and the banks who ceased lending Jarvis money.

“I am annoyed that companies like Babcock in Scotland and Balfour Beattie are pitching to do our jobs.

“I thought our jobs were supposed to be redundant? We are all fully-skilled track men. We can do the work that is still there.”

Job advisers meet with workers still owed weeks of pay

CAREER and job advisers are today rallying to the aid of about 350 Jarvis employees in York who were made instantly redundant last week.

Future Prospects, the City of York Council’s free employment and learning advice service in Swinegate, will be open despite it being a holiday weekend. Staff are braced for a deluge of queries in the aftermath of this week’s collapse of the York-based group whose administrators issued 1,200 redundancy notices to its workers all over Britain.

Many of those affected found themselves still being owed five weeks’ pay and facing mortgage bills. It is understood that administrators from Deloitte are issuing claim forms for the Redundancy Insolvency Fund to recoup some of the money.

But it could be weeks, possibly months before the workforce may be reimbursed and meanwhile many will find themselves turning to Future Prospects for advice.

Jarvis’ lenders, the Bank of America and the Bank of Ireland, pulled the plug on the rail maintenance and freight group after it was hit with a £3.2 million tax bill.

Even though Jarvis was bracing itself for a £5 million operating loss, the group had just been awarded a £250 million contract, but the banks still decided that enough was enough.

A last-minute bid by administrator Deloitte to get Network Rail to agree to a job-saving financial package for part of Jarvis came to nothing – and the redundancy notices were issued.

Now three rail unions, the RMT, TSSA and Unite, are preparing unfair dismissal claims.

A spokesperson from TSSA said: “We believe that the actions taken in the closure of Jarvis, without the requirement to transfer any staff with the contracts is questionable to the extreme.

“We are also aware that the method used to make people redundant, without the legal statutory notice, is a possible contravention of the relevant employment acts.”

The Future Prospect action was announced by City of York Council leader Coun Andrew Waller, who complained that government policy was responsible for “insecurity in the rail industry.”