FROM DERBY TO THE PYRAMIDS
ALSTOM, which bought Bombardier in 2021, is building 70 monorail trains for two monorail routes serving Egypt’s new capital city 45km east of Cairo. The trains are being built in the UK at Derby Litchurch Lane, and Keith Fender went along to view progress
THE Egyptian Government has set out ambitious plans to build a new capital city to take over from Cairo, which is now one of the most populous (at 21 million) and congested cities in the world. The new city – currently known as ‘New Administrative City’ but likely to be given a proper name when more complete (and ‘Egypt’ has been suggested) – will be connected to the old city by the longer of two new monorail lines being built at a total cost of $4.5 billion. The 54km/22 station line links East Cairo to New Administrative City, while a second 42km/12 station line from Giza to 6th October City is also being built south-west of Cairo and west of the River Nile.
The order for 280 ‘Innovia’ monorail vehicles formed into four-car sets was first announced in May 2019. At the time,
Bombardier’s share of the contract was reported to be around €1.2 billion, with an additional €1.1 billion maintenance contract.
As well as new urban transport, ambitious plans for 2000km of new electrified high-speed (230kph) rail lines connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and from Cairo to the border with neighbouring Sudan, were also announced by the Egyptian Government in 2019, with Siemens signing a contract worth up to €8 billion in May 2022. This will cover equipment for the new lines plus 41 ‘Velaro’ high speed EMUs (similar to Eurostar’s Class 374s), 94 ‘Desiro’ high capacity EMUs (as used in neighbouring Israel and Europe), plus 41 ‘Vectron’ electric locos. The new high-speed lines will also serve the New Administrative Capital.
The existing Cairo Metro system is also being modernised, with CAF and Alstom supplying new and refurbished trains, while a brand-new 19km metro line (Line 4) will be built by 2028 connecting central Cairo to the Giza Pyramid Complex and the new Grand Egyptian Museum. Japanese firms Mitsubishi and Kinki Sharyo will deliver 184 cars for this line’s opening from 2025.
Monorails from Derby
Bombardier was the only Europe-based train builder to make monorail trains, and had sold its ‘Innovia’-branded trains to cities around the world; in Asia, Chinese and Japanese firms such as CRRC and Hitachi also make monorail trains.
Before the Egyptian contract, Bombardier had undertaken ‘Innovia’ manufacture and final assembly in China with partner company
CRRC. However, the cost and complexity of logistics for moving completed monorail trains by sea from China to Egypt meant production needed to be somewhere that had a combination of skilled workers, a suitable factory, and good maritime links for the parts made in China to arrive and for completed trains to leave for Egypt – so the UK fitted the bill well. The decision by the British Government to offer a £1.7 billion credit facility to Egypt no doubt helped clinch the deal.
Several of the other big rail contracts recently announced by the Egyptian Government have been also backed by financial assistance from the French and German Governments, which have helped fund trains made by Alstom and Siemens respectively.
The monorail contract represents the first major export order from Derby, or any other British factory, for passenger rolling stock in a decade since the ‘Gautrain’ Electrostar EMUs for South Africa (which were also built in
Derby by Bombardier). Derby was selected by Bombardier as the production site for the Egyptian monorails partly because it was the
company’s European centre for aluminium welding, plus also because it had better productivity figures than other Bombardier body manufacturing sites in Germany or Poland.
In 2019, Bombardier said the Egyptian contract would guarantee employment for at least 100 production staff in Derby from the end of 2022, when construction of current UK ‘Aventra’ orders should have been completed. Monorail construction will continue until the end of 2023 at the earliest.
Production flow
Construction of the Cairo ‘Innovia 300’ vehicles is managed on a flow line in a dedicated area of the Alstom Derby Litchurch Lane factory. The process relies on a supply of components that includes part-finished sections of each vehicle imported into the UK and transported to Derby. The main components (body panels, car ends, traction equipment and bogies/wheelsets) are supplied from an Alstom (formerly Bombardier) Joint Venture with CRRC ‘Puzhen Alstom Transportation Systems Limited’ (PATS) located in Wuhu, eastern China. The PATS factory in China has previously built ‘Innovia 300’ trains for Bangkok in Thailand and Wuhu itself. Once the car body is fully assembled, it is equipped with the traction and guidance traction wheelsets (which incorporate traction motors). From this point on, each vehicle has to sit on a special metal beam that mimics the actual concrete beam they will run on when in use.
Unlike normal rail vehicles, monorail vehicles cannot be lifted off their bogies for shipping. Instead, they have to be carried on a special steel ‘transport beam’ all the way from Derby to the concrete monorail system in Egypt.
Once fully assembled, the vehicles are transferred onto the shipping beam at the end of the production line and taken for static testing. They cannot be tested on the move as there is no test track for them in the UK, so dynamic testing is being done on arrival in Egypt at the new depots at the far end of each route (one in the New Administrative City and the other in 6th October City), where each train is formed into its four-car set. The shipping beams then return to the UK by sea for reuse with future vehicles.
The completed trains are transported by road from Derby to Southampton, shipped to the port of Alexandria in Egypt, and finally moved by road to their future home depot.
The first train left Derby in June 2021 and the sixth left on April 20.
The four-car trains are capable of working in multiple, but options exist to extend them to up to eight-cars. If these options are taken up, the additional vehicles will also be assembled in Derby.
Automatic control
Each four-car is designed mainly for standing passengers; the interiors are mostly white with a few blue and yellow seats, and each train has wide inter-car gangways enabling people to move easily from vehicle to vehicle. The trains will normally operate in automatic mode – although, just like similar automatic metro trains (such as London’s Docklands Light Railway), manual controls are hidden under a panel for use by operating staff if required. Maintenance staff can also use these in depots, and a variety of computer diagnostic systems are also available under a normally locked panel. Interestingly, the computer systems all use English rather than Arabic. The wheelsets fit onto the concrete monorail infrastructure, with rubber-tyred wheels on top of the beam to propel the vehicle and others on the side to hold the vehicle in place. When in service, these are all hidden behind full-length side panels.