The Anonymous Widower

More Bad News For Bombardier

Bombardier may think that as they’ve built the new Victoria line trains for London Underground, that getting the orders for the Picadilly  and Bakerloo lines will be very much a follow on.

That was until I saw this proposal from Siemens.  The trains would offer a bigger capacity, have a through walkway, be quite a bit lighter and use 20 percent less energy. They might even be air-conditioned. Incidentally this looks very much like a proposal I saw on the London Underground web site about seven or eight years ago, proposed by their own engineers.

Incidentally , Bombardier’s new trains for the Victoria line are not cracked up to what they should be, and I know quite a few passengers on the line, who prefer the old trains built in 1967.

So perhaps they lost the Thameslink contract because their proposal wasn’t technically as good as that of Siemens.

You have to remember too that the Thameslink contract was under PFI rules laid down by NuLabor.  As the rating agencies reckon that Siemens are a better financial risk than Bombardier, the finance part of the deal was more expensive for Bombardier, so their proposal would have been more expensive. In fact their consortium would have been paying an extra 1.5% a year for financing the deal compared to Bombardier.

July 23, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | News, Transport/Travel | London Underground, NuLabor, Thameslink, Trains