Bombardier Transportation (www.bombardier.com) recently announced that its Chinese joint venture, Bombardier Sifang (Qingdao) Transportation Ltd (BST), has been awarded a contract from China State Railway Group Co Ltd (China Railway) to supply 160 CR400AF carriages — a new Chinese-standard high-speed train carriage for China’s evolving high-speed rail network.

The carriages will be configured into 16-carriage trains with an operating speed of 350kph. Signed on 31 December, the total contract value is about $427 million.

In 2018, BST won two contracts to build a total of 288 CR400AF carriages, and every one was delivered ‘on time and on quality’. The 160 carriages in the latest contract will be delivered by mid-2020.

Bombardier Transportation in China is a ‘full-solution provider across the entire value chain’.

From vehicles and propulsion to services and design, it has seven joint ventures, six wholly foreign-owned enterprises, and more than 8,000 employees.

Together, the joint ventures have delivered 4,500 railway passenger carriages, 580 electric locomotives and over 2,500 metro cars, monorails, APMs (automated people movers) and trams to China’s growing rail transit markets.

It is also a major signalling supplier to the Chinese high-speed network, and its propulsion equipment and signalling systems are used in a total of 30 Chinese cities.