The closure of a Bradford factory will be the end of an era for the city's electrical engineering industry.

Alstom Electrical Services at Thornbury is to close with the loss of 42 jobs at the end of March.

The electrical engineering firm is all that is left of the once mighty English Electric factory which employed 6,000 workers in the 1960s.

Electrical engineering has taken place on the site for nearly 100 years - employing thousands of people.

The firm is part of the Alstom Group which is based in Rugby and it is believed the company is offering workers at the Bradford factory a chance of another job within the group.

Nobody at Alstom Electrical in Bradford was today prepared to comment on the closure of the 20-year-old factory.

Workers at the factory are believed to have been issued with redundancy notices by the Alstom Group which emerged from the demerger of GEC and French firm Alcatel last year.

The former English Electric factory, which was part of the GEC group, was demolished a number of years ago.

Part of the site is a retail park which includes a B&Q. The rest of the land was bought by Bradford supermarket chain Morrisons which plans to build a new supermarket on the site, creating 350 jobs, and proposed to build a new factory for the firm as part of the deal.

A spokesman for Morrisons said today: "We are sorry to see the jobs go. We are now planning to build light industrial units on the site instead."

Alstom Electrical Services started at the turn of the century as Phoenix Dynamo and in 1918 became the English Electric Company - a merger between four firms.

The firm expanded and in the 1960s the engineering factory in Thornbury and a foundry in Dick Lane were Bradford's biggest private employer with 6,000 workers.

In 1969\70 English Electric merged with GEC and AEI to become English Electric AEI Machines Ltd, which later became GEC Machines then GEC Alsthom.

After last year's demerger the company changed its name slightly to Alstom.

Nobody was available to comment from Alstom Group in Rugby.

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