PLANS to order a fleet of dual-system EMUs reached fruition on May 9, when Mumbai Railway Vikas Corp confirmed the award of a Rs9·25bn contract to Siemens. The deal is being supported by the World Bank as part of a major upgrading and expansion of the Mumbai suburban network.
Siemens India Transportation Systems is to supply traction equipment for the EMUs, which will be assembled at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai over 48 months. The deal provides for ’a high level of local value-added content’, according to Managing Director J Schubert; he says the company is augmenting the capacity of its Kalwa and Nashik factories where the equipment will be manufactured.
The IGBT-based three-phase traction package will be able to accept both the 1·5 kV DC used by Central Railway and the 25 kV AC now used by Western Railway, which will gradually be extended to the whole Mumbai network.
- On May 16 Indian Railways awarded two contracts totalling Rs570m to Siemens Communications for installation of GSM-R on 700 route-km operated by the North Central and East Central zonal railways by the first quarter of 2006.
IR plans to fit GSM-R on 3000 km operated by six zones and has already awarded two contracts, of which Siemens has one covering 500 route-km. The company will supply base stations, control centres, administration platforms and mobile handsets. Specific variations for the IR application include location-dependent and functional addressing.
