The settlement is in exchange for releasing the company from the option Metra acquired from Virginia Railway Express to purchase 21 railcars, as well as compensation for Nippon Sharyo’s delays in delivering Metra’s order of new cars for the Metra Electric Line, according to Metra spokeswoman Meg Thomas-Reile.
The cars have fully assembled interiors and are being shipped by rail. Crews at Metra’s Western Avenue shops will attach the wheel trucks, couplers, grab irons, end steps, and a few other items on the car exteriors, Thomas-Reile said.
The cars were spotted Sunday by railfan Matt Glassman in Leesburg, Ind., on their way to Elkhart on Norfolk Southern 174.
The cars will initially be assigned to the lines served by the Western Avenue facility, namely the Milwaukee District North or West lines, North Central Service, and Heritage Corridor, Thomas-Reile said.
I for the life of me do not know why the S70 light rail vehicles from Siemens were not delivered to Houston’s METRORail by Union Pacific Railroad instead of by truck via I-10 from California.
@Penelope Vinson: Because those deliveries from Siemens didn’t fit the single factor model the UP bean counter laid out in their spreadsheet in support of PSR. PSR wants long unit trains, so if Siemens could make all of the trainsets at once, put them on flatbeds all at once so that UP could deliver them all at once, then and maybe then, they would have gone by rail.
They were part of a base order VRE purchased from Nippon Sharyo back in 2012. The cars were built but never used. Metra was supposed to get these cars last year but there were delays.
From PRNewswire:
On February 15, 2012, Sumitomo Corporation of America in conjunction with its car builder partner Nippon Sharyo, received a contract award from Virginia Railway Express (VRE) for 50 Gallery-type Bi-level Passenger Cars. The base order is to supply 8 cars at a contract price of $21 million and is scheduled to be delivered in 2014. This contract includes an option for VRE to purchase up to an additional 42 cars. If the option is exercised, the total contract would amount to $119 million. VRE will use the cars procured through this contract to update its fleet by replacing some of their older cars and adding more cars to handle their increase in ridership.
Atchison Casting Corporation made the trucks for the prior Metra orders delivered in 2005, but I do not know who made the VRE ones.
Where were they manufactured?