Hitachi and Alstom won a 2.8bn contract in Britain

The government’s High Speed 2 rail project has awarded a £2.8bn contract to build 54 trains to two manufacturing companies: Alstom of France and Hitachi of Japan.

They will run on the new HS2 line from London to Manchester via Birmingham — with a spur to the East Midlands — and on other conventional lines.

HS2 has faced a series of contract disputes, including a lawsuit brought by the US contractor Bechtel over the £1.3bn awards to build a station at Old Oak Common in west London, given to Balfour Beatty.

The contracts include 12 years of maintenance, carried out at a new HS2 depot near Birmingham, which could be extended over the 35-year life of the rolling stock.

Last month, the government announced significant cutbacks to both HS2 and the “HS3” project, connecting several northern cities.

The vehicle body assembly and fit-out stages will be done at Hitachi’s plant in Newton Aycliffe in Durham. In contrast, the second stage of fit-out and testing will occur at the Alstom factory in Derby. As we believe we submitted a strong bid to build Britain’s new HS2 trains,” Siemens said.

In 2017, engineering group CH2M — now Jacobs — handed back a £170m contract to design the second phase of HS2 after Mace, a losing rival in the tender, threatened legal action.

The government said that the first trains for the new line will be produced from 2027 and will start carrying passengers between 2029 and 2033.

Despite the high-profile failure of its Class 800 trains this year, Hitachi won the contract, which caused travel chaos on some of the UK’s busiest lines. The new trains would be 15 per cent lighter while accommodating 30 per cent more seats than comparable high-speed trains in Europe, such as the Italian ETR 1000, officials said.

Those trains, which run on conventional rather than high-speed tracks, were pulled from service for days as a precaution after engineers found cracks on parts of their chassis.

The new trains will be 400 metres long, carry more than 1,000 people and travel at over 225 miles per hour.

The decision is also set to be the subject of a High Court challenge by Siemens.

Summarised www.sba.tax

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