Background
HLE originated in Dartford, England in 1987, as a small engineering company founded by two Imperial College London civil engineering graduates, Louis LeChat and Michael Horace. After successfully winning a small contract to work on the Channel Tunnel project in 1989, HLE grew from strength to strength, finally being acquired in 2005 by the Stairway Engineering Group, a collective of French, Belgian, Dutch and British engineering firms operating in the European railtrack sector.
Today, HLE is one of the leading European providers of automatic railway route setting systems. Over the past five years, firms in the Stairway Engineering have been bidding for contracts in Eastern Europe and, in particular, in Russia, where there have been an increasing number of prospects for growth. In 2009, HLE narrowly missed….