Quote:
Originally Posted by a very long weekend
^ don't forget "buy american" rules, which apply on all projects getting federal funding, at a very significant increase in costs.
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How much is the increase in costs?
When the order of vehicles is numbered so small, there's significant advantages of buying mass produced trains over custom built trains.
HART has bought twenty 4 car autonomous (driverless) EMU trains at a cost of $574 Million, or $28.7 Million per 4 car train.
TexRail has bought eight 4 car DMU trains requiring an engineer (driver) at a cost of $100 Million, or $12.5 Million per 4 car train.
Both trains above qualify for Built in America label and are eligible for USDOT funds.
Very similar trains being built for TexRail have been built in Switzerland for Elron, an Estonia state ran transit company. They ordered 18 EMU and 20 DMU Flirt 3 trains for 176 Million Euros ($204 Million), about $5.4 Million per train. But not all the trains were 4 car trains. Here's the breakdown:
6 DMU 2 car trains
8 DMU + 12 EMU 3 car trains
6 DMU + 6 EMU 4 car trains
That totals up to 120 cars, which would be the equivalent of 30 4 car trains. Redoing the math to reflect the different number of cars per train using 4 cars numbers for comparison purposes, $6.8 Million per train.
$6.8 Million for the basic same train in Europe compared to $12.5 Million in America. That's quite a price increase to make the trains in America, around 183%
But Estonia's Elron wasn't the only orders Stadler Rail Swiss plant had to fulfilled. So some of the lower costs of the trains made in Switzerland can be attributed to making far more of them (30+) as compared to the few being made in Utah (8) for TexRail. Stadler Rail over the years has received over 900 orders for Flirt trains (not cars - trains). And Flirt is just one type of train they build. They have built over 550 GTW trains, over 50 KISS (double level) trains, and around 500 Regio Shuttle trains. Stadler Rail has made more passenger trains than Amtrak has cars, of all types, in their inventory..
There are always savings in any manufacturing line when making larger numbers of items as compared to a custom built shop.