Subscribe to RSSTrains Won’t Be Built Here
Auckland’s electric trains will not be built in New Zealand.
That’s the final word today from KiwiRail in answer to the union campaign to have at least part of the new train built done in Wellington or at Dunedin’s Hillside workshop.
KiwiRail management gave as reasons for its decision:
- NZ workers couldn’t build them in time for the timeline of rolling out the trains in 2013. We lack the scale.
- KiwiRail won’t be cost competitive in the build process. The $500m is a limited amount of money for this order.
- NZ workers have never built EMUs before and so it’s risky.
KiwiRail’s CEO visited the Hillside workshop today to deliver the news and said that it wasn’t a reflection on NZ workmanship and that Hillside had won praise for the work done on building freight wagons and passenger carriages.
“But on price and delivery time the workshop would not compete with very large overseas production plants using advanced engineering equipment to turn out hundreds of units a year.”
1 Comments
Sad not to see a tender at least, a few lawyers for a few days, not too much to ask…