Union leaders are set for a showdown with Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt this week in a bid to save train building at Birmingham's huge Alstom plant.
Top officials from Amicus engineering union will travel to Whitehall to put their case at the end of a high-profile campaign to keep a 150-year manufacturing tradition alive on the Washwood Heath site.
The union believes the Government holds the key to changing the decision by the French group's bosses by changing UK rules on rolling stock purchasing.
It wants to see continental-style regulations which stipulate that a certain percentage of work on major train orders is done in the country they are destined for. Alstom announced in June that work for a £101 million order for London Underground was going to its plants on the continent.
Train assembly in Birmingham would end when the last Pendolino tilting train for Sir Richard Branson rolls off the line next summer.
But Tom Keogh, Amicus regional organiser who has led the Alstom campaign, said the meeting with Patricia Hewitt - and probably Transport Secretary Alistair Darling - later in the week was crucial.
He said the union's general secretary Derek Simpson and representatives from the plant would also be present.
He said: "I will be saying to her that if they don't adopt decent procurement rules for railway stock building, it will be the first time in my life that MPs will have dismissed UK workers."
He added: "Politicians seem to have lost the plot on Washwood Heath. We know it is too late to save all the 1,000 plus jobs but it is not too late to save some train building."
