Saft has inaugurated an assembly line for MRX and MSX rail battery cells at its Zhuhai facility in China. This has a production capacity of 19 MAh/year.
The supervisory board of Bombardier Transportation GmbH and Bombardier Transportation (Bahntechnologie) Holding Germany GmbH unanimously elected Prof Dr Rüdiger Grube as Chairman on May 16. He succeeds Wolfgang Tölsner, who stepped down in April for personal reasons. Grube is Chairman of the supervisory board of Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG and Chairman of Lazard in Germany, and was previously Chairman of Deutsche Bahn AG in 2009-17.
Lithuania has established a €5m fund to provide financial backing for transport innovation by small and medium-sized enterprises. ‘As new ideas and technologies are very risky, the state is going to assume part of the risk through the new co-investment fund and thus encourage private investors to invest into innovations in the transport sector’ said Minister of Transport & Communications Rokas Masiulis on May 7.
UK wagon maintenance company Davis Wagon Services has signed a five-year contract to use 3Squared’s RailSmart HUB, DOCS and FORMS software to further digitise its business processes. It has also extended its use of the RailSmart Employee Development System. This builds on a two-year agreement signed in 2018 for the provision of the EDS app.
The Swiss Federal Office of Transport has certified PROSE as an independent verification body for the calculation of vehicle-specific track access charges.
Online travel management platform TravelPerk now offers rail ticket retailer Trainline’s UK business travel inventory. ‘Access to booking train travel is a growing priority for our customers, and by bringing this much respected service into the platform we are enabling them greater control over their entire trip; reducing the effort involved in organising travel for work while ensuring continual access to the broadest range of options to suit their travel needs’, said Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of TravelPerk.
Manchester-based start-up Raildiary has secured £650 000 of investment from Rail Supply Growth Fund and Angel Groups to develop its Sitediary app, which provides digital project management tools for contractors.
Responding to the May 22 announcement that British Steel Ltd had gone into liquidation, the UK's Railway Industry Association said the supply industry group had recently signed the UK Steel Charter, which seeks to facilitate the use of UK-produced steel in construction and infrastructure projects, and it supported Network Rail’s efforts to ‘increase British Steel orders, ensure prompt payment terms, and commit to a long term schedule whilst immediate funding and a potential buyer is sought’.
