HEAVY vehicle manufacturer Caterpillar expects to take on about 100 staff at its County Durham plant as it continues to recover from the economic downturn.

The company axed 400 of its 1,000-plus workers two years ago in response to falling demand.

Management expect an improving order book will help to boost production back to 2007 levels by the end of this year.

Phil Handley, manager of Caterpillar’s Peterlee site, said: “The employees made a lot of sacrifices. But in the end, we had to lose 300 agency staff and around 100 core workers.

“But it has really started to come back. By April last year we were back to near normal working and orders had doubled and later in the year the order book rose to four times what it was 12 months before.

It is looking very good now.”