All News articles – Page 444
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News
PEOPLE
George Chen has been appointed Chairman of BC Transit.Mike Kinski has been named Chief Executive of Stagecoach Holdings, a post relinquished by Chairman Brian Souter, who will concentrate on business development.Joseph E Arsenault has been appointed Director, Systems Development, for Norfolk Southern. Carlos Roman of Spanish National Railways has been ...
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Pointers
n The Railtrack board is due to consider a business case in the next few weeks for concentrating control of the British railway network into nine management centres, starting with an installation in Manchester to be built between 2001 and 2005.n Argentina’s interior ministry and the provinces of Chubut and ...
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Points on a roll
THE Austroroll system for moving switch blades developed by Enzesfeld-Caro Metallwerke AG has been tested by main line, regional and metro operators throughout Europe, with recent trials conducted by Eurotunnel, Danish State Railways and Wiener Verkehrsbetriebe.Austroroll has been adopted as standard for Type B and C points by Austrian Federal ...
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Procurement politics
WE SHOULD by now be seeing some evidence that European directives on public procurement are generating a positive effect, n’est-ce pas? Yet rolling stock procurement practice looks depressingly familiar. In Britain, nearly all orders in the last few months have gone to the local plants of GEC Alsthom and Adtranz, ...
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PUBLICATIONS
Optimisation of single horizontal railway curvesThis 92-page thesis summarises four reports. It demonstrates how passenger comfort on curve transitions can be optimised for tilting and non-tilting coaches. Forces and climbing ratios are simulated using models of the X2000 and a Eurofima standard coach, each with 46 degrees of freedom.Railway Technology, ...
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Punches pulled
Sir - In Rail Business Report 1998 in the article, ’Infrastructure Separation: What Have We Learned So Far?’, it seems to me that the authors have seriously understated the advantages of not separating the infrastructure but keeping it with operations under one management, as has traditionally been the practice of ...
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Railcars rejected
A RATHER different tale involves a contract for 16 diesel railcars for Finnish State Railways. The contract was won by GEC Alsthom Transporte of Spain, which duly shipped the first car to Helsinki for evaluation and tests. It turned out to be too heavy, although we are told that performance ...
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Railtrack to the rescue
AS SOON as it became evident that LCR’s planned flotation in 1998 had little chance of success, discussions with Railtrack began last autumn in an effort to put a rescue package together. The original consortium members saw this as a way of preserving their interest in LCR.On February 12, Railtrack’s ...
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Stop on Red
The Los Angeles metro - the Red line which celebrated its fifth birthday on January 30 - became a byword for delays, political interference and cost over-runs.On January 15, the board of the LA Metropolitan Transportation Authority accepted the recommendation of acting Chief Executive Officer Julian Burke that planning work ...
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Roscos under review
ON FEBRUARY 3 Britain’s Rail Regulator John Swift QC began to examine whether the rolling stock leasing companies, Angel Trains, Forward Trust Rail and Porterbrook, should be subject to tighter controls. Acting at the behest of Transport Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Swift invited responses by March 2 ...
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U-Bahn stock
STADTWERKE München has ordered 10 new U-Bahn trainsets for DM170m, to enter service at the end of 2000. The 115m long six-car trains will be fully open-plan inside with wide inter-car gangways for improved security and passenger flows. Consortium leader Siemens will supply the electrical equipment; mechanical parts will come ...
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Subte transfer
ARGENTINIAN President Carlos Menem has instructed Transport Secretary Armando Carnosa to transfer responsibility for the 20-year Subte metro operating concession to the city government. Detailed negotiations began on January 13, and by January 19 the federal government was understood to have accepted the city’s main demand - that 380m pesos ...
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Tramway upgrade
POLISH tramway operator PKT of Katowice has awarded a US$53·4m contract to GEC Alsthom and its local subsidiary Konstal for modernisation and re-equipment of its principal route from the city to Bytom (RG 2.98 p122). The project is expected to halve journey times on routes 6 and 41 and boost ...
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CPR to spend C$1bn in 1998
CANADIAN PACIFIC Railway is to invest C$1bn on capital projects during 1998, under a spending plan announced on December 17. This comfortably exceeds CPR’s previous record spend of C$700m in 1997, and will bring the total investment since 1995 to almost C$3bn. Almost half of the money, C$450m, will pay ...
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X2000 to China
A SEVEN-car X2000 tilting trainset was dispatched from the Adtranz works in Västerås on January 14 for a two-year demonstration programme in China. Due to arrive next month, the train is being sent under an agreement between Adtranz and the semi-autonomous Guangshen Railway Corp. After commissioning, the X2000 is ...
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Royal Thalys pioneers first 300 km/h inter-capitals route
The final piece of the TGV Nord-Europe jigsaw was slotted into place on December 10 when an inaugural Royal Thalys carried King Albert II and Queen Paola from Brussels to Paris and back to mark completion of the 71 km Belgian section of the 314·6 km high speed route. Murray ...
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Angel worth £395m
BRITISH rolling stock leasing company Angel Train Contracts was sold on December 19 to Royal Bank of Scotland by the GRS Holdings consortium of Nomura International, Babcock & Brown and Prideaux & Associates which bought it debt-free from the government in November 1995 for £696m. Debt funding worth £690m for ...
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Iranians to build AC diesels
ISLAMIC Iranian Republic Railways (RAI) has ordered 100 diesel locomotives from GEC Alsthom to haul 140 km/h passenger trains and freights at up to 110 km/h. The 4300hp AD43C Co-Cos will be powered by Ruston 16RK215 diesel engines using Onix IGBT-based asynchronous traction drives. Under the US$125m contract announced on ...
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Open access freight
ON JANUARY 16 Australian operator Great Northern Rail Services Pty Ltd of Gisborne launched the first fully-independent intrastate train on the tracks of the Victoria state rail network, hauling infrastructure materials from Melbourne to Newport via Tottenham. With a fleet of nine regaugable broad/standard-gauge diesel locos, GNRS has achieved full ...
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Adding capacity in QR’s coal corridors
INTRO: With coal from central Queensland in demand from over 30 countries, QR is investing to raise throughput on its busy heavy haul routes linking mines and portsDISCUSSION about the environmental problems caused by burning fossil fuels is not exactly taboo at Queensland Railways’ Coal & Minerals Group, but it’s ...