All articles by Railway Gazette International – Page 1339
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News
Market share increasing
AS EUROPE’s railways cast around for the best structures to manage and operate international freight trains, evidence suggests that rail is at long last starting to increase its share of the freight market in Western Europe, with cross-border tonnage showing significant growth. The European Council of Ministers of Transport reports ...
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Haenel worked, so what now?
REVIEWING progress with the programme to transfer responsibility for regional rail services to local government at a special seminar in the French Senate on March 4, Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot announced that he would ’make efforts to extend regionalisation’. Judging by the performance of the six regions where the experiment ...
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Frantour sold
FRENCH National Railways’ holding arm SNCF Participations (formerly Sceta) has sold its interest in travel agency Frantour to the Accor group, which also owns Wagons Lits. On-train services accounted for 26·7% of Accor’s turnover during 1998, the company announced on February 11.SNCF Participations’ President Jean-Pierre Leclerc is also looking at ...
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Summit pulls fragmented railway together
FOUR MINISTERS lined up to launch the National Rail Summit in London on February 25: Prime Minister Tony Blair, Deputy PM John Prescott who also heads the department covering transport, Minister of Transport John Reid, and junior transport minister Glenda Jackson. Facing them were 180 chairmen and top executives of ...
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Malpensa Express to open next month
FERROVIE NORD MILANO has brought forward the start of operations on its Malpensa Express airport service to May 30, from the planned date of July 1. The decision follows completion of tracklaying on the branch from Busto Arsizio on January 28. FNM President Norberto Achille expects the final fitting out ...
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NJ Transit to go double-deck
NEW JERSEY Transit is to invest up to US$1·3bn in new rolling stock for its 12 rail corridors, increasing capacity by almost 50% between now and 2005. Initial proposals were presented to the NJ Transit board on March 11, although funding sources have yet to be identified.An initial order would ...
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Dieter
CAPTION: One cost-effective way of reducing vandalism and deterring youths from hanging around at metro and urban railway stations is to broadcast classical music. Playing Bach and Beethoven over the public address system is a method tried and tested from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Toronto. But Montreal’s metro has taken the art ...
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Design improvements help to keep diesel locos on the road
INTRO: Many developing railways face problems of locomotive availability; simple design changes to overcome common faults may have significant returns in reduced failures and quicker maintenanceBYLINE: S Gopalan*Advisor, MechanicalIrcon InternationalBYLINE: * Mr S Gopalan was previously Chief Motive Power Engineer for India’s Southern Railway, and spent four years at ...
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Delhi resignalled
IN A 44h changeover during February, Indian Railways put into operation its largest route-relay interlocking, to control the junction at Old Delhi. Designed by Siemens using 11000 Series K-50 relays, it controls 1122 routes on 28 running lines, with 238 signals and 188 sets of points. The station currently handles ...
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Eurotunnel declares net profit
Executive Chairman Patrick Ponsolle announced on March 15 that Eurotunnel had achieved a net profit of £64m in 1998. This included exceptional items from the financial restructuring, but the underlying loss was cut by almost £400m to £215m. An operating profit of £184m enabled 69% of the interest due on ...
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Nacala deal
OPERATION of Mozambique's 700 km northern line between the Malawi border at Nayuci and the port of Nacala is set to be handed over to a private sector consortium on October 1. State-owned ports and railway authority CFM has selected the Sociedade de Desenvolvimente do Corredor de Nacala as preferred ...
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DB prepares to launch Metropolitan
GERMAN RAILWAY will cautiously test the waters of privatisation next month. They will probably not be too cold, for the experiment falls well short of a true handover to the private sector, but it is a venture in that direction. DB has set up Metropolitan Express Train GmbH as a ...
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Crossfleet to maintain VCC trains
Under the terms of a £1bn contract for a fleet of new tilting and non-tilting diesel multiple-units, Bombardier Transportation has taken over responsibility for maintenance of the entire Virgin CrossCountry fleet for the rest of the 15-year franchise to 2012
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Cross-border link
CONSTRUCTION of the 44 km cross-border link from Zalalovo in Hungary to Murska Sobota in Slovenia was due to get under way during March, for completion by the end of 2000. Part of the European Union’s Corridor V linking Italy and Ukraine, it is expected to cost HF22·5bn. Part of ...
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Ludewig in a corner
LAST MONTH we drew attention to the plight of German Railway, which has become an unwelcome focus for media interest in the wake of the Eschede ICE disaster last year. When DB Chairman Dr Johannes Ludewig announced details of his company’s 1998 performance on March 3, his first remarks addressed ...
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First West Rail E&M contracts
ON MARCH 8 Hong Kong’s Kowloon - Canton Railway Corp awarded the first two railway systems contracts for its West Rail project, valued at a total of HK$3·5bn. The 30·3 km West Rail Phase I linking Kowloon, Yuen Long and Tuen Mun is due to be completed in 2003. Worth ...
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V/Line Freight concessioned
THE SUCCESSFUL bidder to run rail freight in the Australian state of Victoria was announced by state Premier Jeff Kennett on February 22. The Freight Victoria consortium has agreed to pay just over A$163m for V/Line Freight under a 15-year renewable lease to operate and maintain the rail network outside ...
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Competition shunted off line
IT WOULD BE wrong to call the Great British Experiment in restructuring state-owned railways a failure. Estimates for the year to March 31 show passenger-km up 23% and freight tonne-km up 40% on 1994-95. Four decades have passed since passenger-km on Britain’s main line network last topped 35 billion. Nevertheless, ...
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Putting the brakes on
THE long-running saga of concession renegotiation in Argentina took a sudden and unexpected turn on February 3, when a last-minute legal challenge from consumer group UUC prevented the new contracts for the Mitre, Sarmiento and Urquiza commuter networks (RG 2.99 p65) in Buenos Aires from being signed into law. The ...