Metro-Cammell (Saltley/Washwood Heath)

Metro-Cammell — the Metropolitan-Cammell Carriage and Wagon Company — was the largest British carriage and rolling-stock builder of the British Railways era, formed in 1929 by the merger of the Metropolitan Carriage and Wagon Company of Saltley and the railway interests of Cammell Laird. With works at Saltley and (from the 1960s) primarily at Washwood Heath in Birmingham, Metro-Cammell built the bulk of British Railways' first-generation diesel multiple-unit fleet, successive generations of London Underground tube stock, and large quantities of EMU bodywork for the expanding electrified network.

Metro-Cammell's most numerically significant product was the Class 101 diesel multiple-unit — over 760 cars built between 1956 and 1959, the most numerous first-generation DMU type and a fixture of British secondary railway services for over four decades. The firm also built the aluminium-bodied 4-CEP and 4-CIG EMU families for the Southern Region, the London Underground 1973 Tube Stock for the Piccadilly Line, and the Network SouthEast Networker EMU family. The combination of DMU and EMU capability, London Underground stock production, and export orders to overseas railways gave Metro-Cammell a breadth of rolling-stock manufacturing unmatched among British private builders of its era.

The firm was acquired by GEC-Alsthom in 1989 and continued as Alstom Washwood Heath until closure in August 2005, ending nearly 175 years of continuous railway carriage building in Birmingham — a tradition whose origins preceded the railways themselves in the early carriage and wagon trade of the West Midlands.