British Rail Engineering Limited

British Rail Engineering Limited

Industry	Train & carriage manufacturing & maintenance
Predecessor	British Rail Workshops
Founded	1 January 1970
Defunct	September 1992
Fate	Privatised
Successor	ABB
Headquarters	Derby, England
Parent	British Railways Board (1969–1989)

British Rail Engineering Limited (BREL) was the rolling stock manufacturing and maintenance subsidiary of British Rail.

It was established on 1 January 1970 by the British Railways Board to operate its 14 rolling stock maintenance centres and to provide construction, maintenance, and repair services to Britain’s railways. A key activity of BREL was the manufacturing of new rolling stock, such as the InterCity 125 trainset, the Mark 3 carriage, and the British Rail Class 58 freight locomotive. Both domestic and international sales were pursued; rolling stock produced by BREL was exported to various nations, including the Republic of Ireland, Kenya, Taiwan, Sweden, Malaysia, Yugoslavia, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Numerous projects were undertaken on a collaborative basis with private sector manufacturers, including Brush Traction, Metro-Cammell, and Metropolitan-Vickers. BREL also built numerous prototype rail vehicles, such as the Class 140 and Class 210 DEMUs and the experimental high-speed Advanced Passenger Train (APT) tilting train.

Throughout the 1980s, BREL was subjected to repeated restructuring and job cuts; various works, such as Ashford, Shildon, and Swindon were closed permanently. The organisation was effectively cut in two when the maintenance arm was split off as British Rail Maintenance Limited in 1987. The British government sought to make BREL more internationally competitive. The design and building of trains was privatised in 1989,^[1] purchased by the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate Asea Brown Boveri (40%), Trafalgar House (40%), and a management-employee buy-out (20%). After ABB became the sole shareholder in September 1992, it was subsumed into ABB Transportation.