Siemens will deliver one Vectron locomotive to the State Railway Administration (Ukrzaliznytsia) for testing. Ukrzaliznytsia’s acting head Oleksandr Zavhorodnyi announced this to reporters during a meeting with shippers at the European Business Association, the CFTS correspondent reports.
As CFTS previously reported, Dmitry Chornenky, the head of the Integrated Transport Systems Department at Siemens Ukraine, said on 11 September that Siemens was not interested to organizing joint production in Ukraine.
"What is a joint production? It means that I have to take money or technology, bring them here, and give them to someone else. Therefore, joint production is not interesting," said Chornenky.
According to him, Siemens can supply components for production. "But, again, we are ready to supply components for hundreds of locomotives; for two - it is meaningless. It is business, nothing personal," he said.
As the CFTS portal reported previously, the basic parameters of the main electric locomotive with a synchronous drive that will serve as the underlying platform for upgrading Ukrzaliznytsia’s locomotive fleet will be determined at a meeting of the locomotive section of Ukrzaliznytsia’s scientific and technical council on 1 October 2015.
In addition, Ukrzaliznytsia is currently developing a sectoral program for improving the technical condition of general-purpose railways in Ukraine in the period of 2016-2015, which is expected to be approved at the state level.
As reported, Zavhorodnyi said in an interview with the CFTS in August that the technical council of Ukrzaliznytsia would adopt a concept on the type of electric locomotives that should operate on Ukraine’s rail network and their operating parameters.
"We have a situation in which the Kryukov Railcar Building Works has drafted two dozen technical specifications for various locomotives because there are no concrete specifications. I asked the owner of the works why they did this and he replied, ‘We will build all types of locomotives.’ Maybe they are not needed. Do we really need so many locomotives? We must understand the type of electric locomotive we are choosing. We will also consider the main issues involving electrification at the meeting of the technical council," said Zavhorodnyi.
