Looks like the press have got their knickers in a twist over the contract for the new trains for the London-Edinburgh route, and London-Cardiff route.
The big ‘problem’ is that the contract was awarded to a consortium led by Hitatchi rather than one led by Bombardier. The issue being that Bombardier has a large factory in the UK, whereas Hitatchi would be making the initial batch of trains in Japan before letting us Brits have a go at making them.
Some nationalistic elements in the press are going on about having foreign firms doing this work, while conveniently forgetting that Bombardier themselves are Canadian.
Me, well I’d rather have some proper Japanese trains to be honest. Look at the introduction of the Class 180 ‘Adelante’ fleet. Built by Alstrom (a French engineering company), they turned out to be a big pile of unreliable crap, and are already being withdrawn from service!!!
In fact, Hitatchi, come on over and fix everything else for us. What’s so stupid about the contract is that there are no plans to electrify the whole of the rail network. So it means they have to build diesel, electric and diesel/electric hybrid versions of the trains. For f**ks sake, just do the job properly. Surely it’s better to spend the extra on the electrification costs, and then save by not needing to build diesel and diesel/electric hybrid variants of these new trains.
Come on. We built the original Japanese rail system in the late 1800′s. Now it’s their turn to return the favour 
