ENGINEERS are being recruited from as far away as New Zealand to rebuild Britain's beleaguered rail infrastructure, The Northern Echo can reveal.

A chronic shortage of skilled railway safety experts has forced bosses to launch a worldwide recruitment campaign.

They are hoping to tempt scores of engineers from the other side of the world to work in Britain - home of the railways.

The move comes as the railway industry grapples with a skills shortage which unions fear could put lives at risk.

North-East engineering company Amec, which has contracts with Railtrack's successor, Network Rail, has placed adverts in New Zealand's national papers, asking for up to 150 experienced railway staff.

The company's rail maintenance and projects division, Amec Spie Rail, is seeking signal engineers, track safety trainers and overhead line managers.

Overseas staff are promised contracts lasting up to two years with "attractive salaries" and generous accommodation allowances.

A spokesman said: "We are advertising in countries that have UK standards, as there is a shortage of highly-skilled labour in the railway industry over here."

But last night, Stan Herschel, regional organiser with the Rail Maritime and Transport union, said an engineering skills shortage was leading to a backlog in maintenance and inspection work.

He said: "Railtrack believed that they could maintain the railways with a lot less people and they gave huge swathes of highly-skilled people redundancy, with a view to doing things on a shoestring and making vast profits.

"Now we have an endemic skills shortage and have got to look to bring people in from abroad.

"There are safety implications in this. We have learnt that each disaster in which people are killed and injured emphasises a lack of skills in certain grades, and there is a realisation that we cannot run things the way they have been running."

Anne McIntosh, Vale of York MP and Tory shadow transport spokeswoman, asked: "Why are we looking to New Zealand to recruit these workers?

"We recognise that there is a need for more qualified rail engineers, and there has to be an identified skills strategy."

Railway expert Peter Rayner, a former British Rail manager, said most of the jobs being advertised fulfilled a "crucial safety role".

He said: "This points to neglect in the way that Railtrack exercised its stewardship over the railways in the five or six years it was in existence.

"They let the railways get into a terrible state and allowed skilled people to leave. Now we are trying to claw them back."

Critics say the privatisation of the railways led to a haemorrhaging of skilled staff as Railtrack sought to contract and sub-contract engineering work to a myriad of different companies.

Many workers took early retirement or moved to other industries.

The not-for-profit Network Rail, which has taken over Railtrack's responsibility for track, signalling and stations, has begun trying to bring more engineering projects in-house.

Railtrack was heavily criticised for its maintenance record in the wake of the Potters Bar crash last, in which seven people were killed.

The crash last May was blamed on faulty track points and missing nuts.

A spokesman for Network Rail said there had been years of under investment in the railway network.

He added: "It is no secret that people with technical expertise are thin on the ground in the UK, and this is a problem that we are trying to address by bringing people in from overseas."