BULGARIA: Spanish manufacturer Talgo has announced details of the trainsets it has proposed in response to a call for tenders to supply and maintain 20 push-pull inter-city trainsets.
CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive submitted a much lower bid for the tender called by Bulgaria’s Ministry of Transport & Communications, and the European Commission has launched an investigation into whether the Chinese state-owned company has benefited from unfair subsidy.
Talgo said its Intercity BG trains would be ‘designed and constructed in the European Union’. They would be based on the same technical standards as the Talgo 230 trains it is supplying to Germany’s DB and Denmark’s DSB, making them ‘born by design’ with interoperability for use on TEN-T corridors within Bulgaria and potentially in neighbouring countries.
There would be a single conventional locomotive, intermediate passenger coaches and a driving car. Talgo said ‘this is the ideal solution to get all the traditional benefits of lightweight, conventional trains’ but without the need for shunting locos.
Each set would have around 390 seats, with the wide body providing ‘unique passenger comfort’. There would be 100% low-floor access from 760 mm high platforms, and ‘good’ accessibility from lower ones.
The lightweight structure would offer a high power-to-weight ratio to reduce energy consumption and cut acceleration and braking times. Talgo said this would be ‘especially helpful’ for Bulgarian operating conditions, where trains make many intermediate stops and up to 80% of routes are single-track, making timekeeping important.
