The Alstom company (France) and Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the Dutch national railway operator, have officially opened a new fitting line for InterCity Next Generation (ICNG) trains at the Alstom plant in Katowice.
The French company told the CFTS portal that Alstom would supply 79 Coradia Stream trains (the intercity modification) with a maximum speed of 200 km/h and a total passenger capacity of the fleet of 25,000 seats to the Dutch railway operator. Alstom will supply 8-car and 5-car versions of the trains to NS under the terms of a July 2016 contract.
The first trains will be delivered from January 2020 onwards. They will run on the Dutch national network on the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Breda high-speed line in 2021 and on the Den Haag-Eindhoven corridor in 2022. The total value of the contract is over EUR 800 million, with options for more trains.
According to Alstom, the trains feature multi-purpose areas for reading, resting, wheelchairs, and bicycles, as well as dedicated restrooms for people with reduced mobility. They are equipped with Wi-Fi, power sockets, and LED lighting and a dynamic real-time passenger information system.
The new fitting hall in Katowice covers 6,500 square metres of space and includes 20 work stations, representing the full process from pre-fitting to cabling and interior fitting. Car body shell welding and erection, painting and final testing are performed in separate halls. The fitting line in Katowice employs over 110 people. It is designed to produce one train car every working day.
According to Alstom, the company’s Katowice facility is a 250,000-square-metre engineering and manufacturing plant for metros and regional trains. The plant currently employs over 2,000 highly skilled employees.
As the CFTS portal reported from Berlin, Alstom Pop, a regional high-speed train that was developed for Italian Railways based on Coradia Stream, was presented at the InnoTrans 2018 exhibition in September.
As reported in November, Alstom intends to submit a proposal on upgrade of the Ukrainian Railways’ locomotive fleet. The company will offer Prima T8 freight locomotives and Prima M4 BoBo passenger locomotives to the Ukrainian Railways.
