Montreal engineer Bombardier Transportation announced yesterday that its Chinese joint venture, Bombardier Sifang Transportation (BST) has won a US$250m deal to supply the China State Railway Group with 112 high-speed train coaches.
BST, which was established in 1998 as a 50-50 joint venture between Bombardier and Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock, will supply 14 eight-coach trainsets with an operating speed of 250km/h by January next year.
Jianwei Zhang, president of BST, said, "We are honoured to have been chosen to supply the new generation of high-speed railway CR300AF trains. We sincerely thank China Railway for its trust and CRRC for its support. We will deliver the state-of-art trains at quality, within budget and on time."
The CR300AF, also known as the Fuxing Hao, is the design developed by CRRC, the world’s largest train-maker, as the standard rolling stock for China’s high-speed network.
This order follows BST’s success in winning a supply contract with China Railway in 2018. So far, the venture has delivered a total of 448 coaches.
Of the 14 trainsets, 10 are for Fujian Fuping Railway and four are for the Guangdong Meizhou-Shantou Passenger Dedicated Line.
Bombardier has seven joint ventures in China, six wholly owned enterprises, and more than 8,000 employees.
Altogether, it has been involved in the delivery of 4,600 railway passenger cars, 580 electric locomotives and over 3,000 metro cars to Chinese clients. It is also a supplier of signalling systems to the high-speed network.
Bombardier is presently in the process of completing a merger with French engineer Alstom (see further reading).
Image: The CR300AF in action (Bombardier)
Further reading:
