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lsandersonOverseas, the Trains and the Market for Them Accelerate
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
KREFELD, Germany - Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding.
In one vast hall, workers in blue overalls are putting the finishing touches on what would, on an old-fashioned train, be a locomotive, except that it houses a spacious conference room with a large table and seven comfortable armchairs.
In an adjacent hall, others are attaching what look like ordinary wheel trucks to a rail car, except that these contain electric motors that will essentially do the locomotive's job of pulling the train.
"We're now turning out a car every one or two days," said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. "When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day."
Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business.
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
KREFELD, Germany - Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding.
In one vast hall, workers in blue overalls are putting the finishing touches on what would, on an old-fashioned train, be a locomotive, except that it houses a spacious conference room with a large table and seven comfortable armchairs.
In an adjacent hall, others are attaching what look like ordinary wheel trucks to a rail car, except that these contain electric motors that will essentially do the locomotive's job of pulling the train.
"We're now turning out a car every one or two days," said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. "When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day."
Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business.
