Siemens awarded €600 million

(TS) is to supply eight Velaro type high-speed trains to Russian Railways (RZD) and also assume responsibility for their maintenance for a period of 30 years. The contract for the trains and the maintenance is worth around €600 million.

The corresponding contracts were signed by Siemens and RZD yesterday in Sochi, Russia. “This order will give Russia the most modern high-speed trains in the world. At the same time, this contract provides an excellent basis for a long-term partnership between Siemens and RZD in all sectors of rail industry,” said Hans M. Schabert, President of the Transportation Systems Group of Siemens, at the contract signing ceremony.

Designed to travel at 250 km/h, these new trains are to be used initially on the Moscow–St. Petersburg route and, later on, operate between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. Some of the trains will be equipped to run on DC and AC electrified lines. With ten cars and a total length of 250 metres, they will be able to accommodate more than 600 passengers. The trains will be built for the Russian broad-gauge network and, consequently, be approximately 33cm wider than Germany’s high-speed ICE 3 trains.

The contract signed yesterday for the delivery of the trains was preceded by a €40 million development contract that had been concluded in April 2005. The design and planning work for the Russian high-speed train will be done at Siemens’ two German locations, Erlangen and Krefeld-Uerdingen. Train production will also take place in Germany. The last trains are due to be delivered by 2010.

The train for Russia, called Velaro RUS, is based on Siemens’ high-speed train platform “Velaro”, a development which originally began with the ICE 3 train for Deutsche Bahn (DB AG). The advantage of the Velaro platform is its multiple-unit train concept in which, for example, all traction equipment is accommodated under the floor of the high-speed train so that approximately 20 percent more seats are gained from the same length of train.