USA: Los Angeles County MTA has awarded South Korean company Woojin Industrial Systems a $214m contract to modernise 74 metro cars ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics.
The A650 vehicles were originally supplied by Italian company Breda in the late 1990s.
The modernisation will include renewal of the control, auxiliary power, monitoring, information and air-conditioning systems. The project covers work on 14 vehicles which were left incomplete when a 2016 contract for Talgo to modernise the cars was cancelled in 2022.
Tenders for the current upgrading project were called in December 2022 and LAMTA representatives visited Woojin’s US plant in July 2023 before the company submitted its final proposal for in November.
Woojin formed a Los Angeles subsidiary to target the US rail market in 2011, and it has since won control system and component contracts in Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts and Utah.
‘It’s a great achievement for us to have won the project, by which the US has recognised our restoration capabilities for existing hardware-plus-software electronic systems’, the company told South Korean media when it announced the order on May 21.
