Boston to embrace metro trains made in China
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, September 8, 2015
Over 100 years since the remission of the Boxer Indemnity, Boston’s Springfield is expected to embrace its first batch of metro trains made in China, as the Springfield factory of CRRC has been in construction since Sept. 3, 2015.
Having once accommodated the earliest Chinese students who traveled to the United States for study, Springfield was witness to Zhan Tianyou’s admittance to Yale University. Zhan was a pioneering Chinese railroad engineer known as the "Father of China's Railroad."
The old subway stations in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts, which were built several years before the New York metro lines, has been using old trains which served for more than 30 years on the rail.
In spite of its long history of metro lines, Boston has never had train manufacturers. Therefore, they initiated a global bid about five years ago, in which a Chinese manufacturer eventually overwhelmed other competitors including Hyundai Rotem from South Korea (bidding at around US$ 720 million), Bombardier from Canada (bidding at US$ 1.08 billion) and Kawasaki from Japan (bidding at US$ 950 million). The Chinese manufacturer submitted the lowest bid for the trains which would run on the orange and red metro lines at the price of US$566 million. Thanks to the low price, which does not exceed the governmental budget, there will not be any train services fares hike after the operation of the new trains.
According to the local bill, the contracted project is definitely a technical transference, as the Chinese company needs to purchase 60 percent of their parts from the United States and invest around US$60 million to hire 150 local people for the assembly line.
Amid protests from the three subway manufacturers who lost the opportunity, the Massachusetts State traffic bureau refuted that the Chinese manufacturer won the bid through just and meticulous scrutiny. The state bureau welcomes the low cost quality products.
According to Sina.com.cn, there are two major concerns of the local residents over the project. One is whether the train can be put into operation by 2018 under the protracted manners of the local government and the second is whether the Chinese manufacturer will polish the railways where the new trains will run in the same way the company has showed in pictures.
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