On the 10th of July, exactly one year after signing the contracts, ALSTOM, a French firm provided the first new metro trains for Budapest. The 100 metre long, air-conditioned metro trains will be in full service from September, later this year. On the official ceremony we found out what took so long for the trains to arrive, we found out about the recycled materials that were used during the manufacturing and last but not least we also found out why István Tarlós got an extra key.

Why the delay?

“We can really be happy today; at least we have a reason.” – said

István Tarlós

about the debut of the new metro trains. At the official ceremony, that took place at the

Puskás Ferenc Stadion station, the Lord Mayor received two keys from the CEO of the

Alstom

group,

Patrick Krom . The first key starts the engine of the first metro train, the other commemorates the contract that was signed exactly a year ago.
The new trains arrived quite late; the reasons of the delay were shortly enlisted by

István Tarlós , however the official papers and documents about the problems would fill up a library. The main problem was caused by a previous contract, that was inherited by the new government and that needed serious updating. Only by June of 2011 was the new government able to get the signatures of the opposition to commission the 110 new metro cars.

Alstom, the great

Alstom has been manufacturing metro trains for more than 70 years now. One out of every four metro train is made by them.

The city commissioned 22 trains from the French firm, each train with 5 metro cars. The

METROPOLIS

metro cars were designed in

France , the drive systems are manufactured in

Hungary

and the trains are assembled in

Katowice, Poland.

The metro cars are manufactured of recycled materials – they are actually built from 98% of recycled materials. From this September on three cars will arrive month after month, resulting in the complete change of the cars of the M2 line.What about the rest?

What about metro line 3 and 4? This question was asked by the impatient citizens and by the CEO of

Alstom

as well.

Alstom

of course also mentioned that they would be glad to help the city. They already proved that they could deal with basically anything and everything but one final challenge remained: the passenger test.


Members of the media were the ones who could participate in the test drive along with prominent figures such as

Dávid Vitézy , CEO of

Centre for Budapest Transport , members of the

French Embassy

and

István Tarlós , Lord Mayor of Budapest.