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Spain awards €786m high-speed train contract to Talgo

Spain has awarded a contract worth €786 million ($832 million) to supply and maintain 15 new high-speed trains for Spanish train maker Talgo, the public works minister said Monday.

Published: 29 November 2016 09:19 CET

Spain awards €786m high-speed train contract to Talgo

Photo: AFP

Talgo beat out rival bids by Germany's Siemens and France's Alstom for the tender, which can be extended for a second batch of 15 more trains that would raise the total value of the contract to €1.4 billion.

“The winning offer was presented by Talgo,” Public Works Minister Inigo de la Serna told a news conference in Madrid.

The company presented “the best offer from both the technical and economic point of view”, he added.

The initial contract is to build 15 new high-speed trains and maintain them for 30 years. The construction of the trains will take around five years and generate around 1,000 jobs, the minister said.

Talgo is already the main supplier of high-speed trains to Spanish national rail operator Renfe, with 47 percent of the market, ahead of Siemens which has a 27 percent share and Alstom with 26 percent.

The new contract will give Talgo a 54 percent share of Renfe's high-speed train market, a Talgo spokesman told AFP.

Spain has Europe's biggest high-speed rail network, with over 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) of high-speed track.

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Swedish government shelves plans for two fast train links

In an announcement slipped out just before Christmas Eve, the government said it had instructed the Swedish Transport Administration to stop all planning for the Borås to Gothenburg link, stop the ongoing work on linking Hässleholm and Lund.

“The government wants investments made in the railway system to first and foremost make it easier for commuting and cargo traffic, because that promotes jobs and growth,” infrastructure minister Andreas Carlson said in a press release. “Our approach is for all investments in the railways that are made to be more cost effective than if the original plan for new trunk lines was followed.”

Ulf Olsson, the Social Democrat mayor in Borås, told the TT newswire that the decision was “a catastrophe”.

“We already have Sweden’s slowest railway, so it’s totally unrealistic to try to build on the existing railway,” he said. We are Sweden’s third biggest commuting region and have no functioning rail system, and to release this the day before Christmas Eve is pretty symptomatic.”

Per Tryding, the deputy chief executive for the Southern Sweden Chamber of Commerce, complained that the decision meant Skåne, Sweden’s most southerly county, would now have no major rail infrastructure projects.

“Now the only big investment in Skåne which was in the plan is disappearing, and Skåne already lay far behind Gothenburg and Stockholm,” he said.

“This is going to cause real problems and one thing that is certain that it’s going to take a very long time, whatever they eventually decide. It’s extremely strange to want to first suspend everything and then do an analysis instead of doing it the other way around.”

The government’s instructions to the transport agency will also mean that there will be no further planning on the so-called central parts of the new planned trunk lines, between Linköping and Borås and Hässleholm and Jönköping.

Carlson said that the government was prioritising “the existing rail network, better road standards, and a build-out of charging infrastructure”.

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