Skip to main content

Virginia Railway Express orders bi-level passenger rail cars

Sumitomo Corporation of America, in conjunction with its car builder partner Nippon Sharyo, has received a contract award from Virginia Railway Express (VRE) for 50 Gallery-type Bi-level passenger cars. The base order is to supply eight cars at a contract price of $21 million and is scheduled to be delivered in 2014. This contract includes an option for VRE to purchase up to an additional 42 cars. If the option is exercised, the total contract would amount to $119 million. VRE will use the cars procured thr
March 22, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
Sumitomo Corporation of America, in conjunction with its car builder partner Nippon Sharyo, has received a contract award from 4179 Virginia Railway Express (VRE) for 50 Gallery-type Bi-level passenger cars. The base order is to supply eight cars at a contract price of $21 million and is scheduled to be delivered in 2014. This contract includes an option for VRE to purchase up to an additional 42 cars. If the option is exercised, the total contract would amount to $119 million. VRE will use the cars procured through this contract to update its fleet by replacing some of their older cars and adding more cars to handle their increase in ridership.

The gallery-type bi-level passenger car is a unique type of bi-level car which has open space between the two sides of the upper deck and allows ticket collectors to check tickets on both levels from the bottom level. Sumitomo Corporation of America with Nippon Sharyo has already delivered a total of 71 passenger cars to VRE. Moreover, a total of 643 gallery-type bi-level passenger cars has already been supplied by Sumitomo Corporation of America and Nippon Sharyo in the US.

Related Content

  • February 3, 2012
    Pioneering new passenger information systems
    Chicago pioneers new passenger information initiatives. By David Crawford
  • August 1, 2012
    InfoConnect delivers accurate travel information on all levels
    Deryk Whyte provides an overview of how the New Zealand Transport Agency's InfoConnect concept was developed. Historically, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) (formerly Transit New Zealand) has faced challenges in communicating effectively with road users, its customers, about highway-related events or incidents in a timely, accurate manner. Prior to 2007, Transit relied on a third-party organisation to collect and disseminate national road condition information. This often resulted in incomplete infor
  • August 20, 2015
    Promoting cycling is the solution to congestion and pollution
    Cycling offers health, air quality and road space/parking benefits, promoting governments and the EU to look at tax and technology initiatives. David Crawford reports. One way to improve urban air quality is to make green alternatives to car use financially attractive. Incentivising employees to switch their travel-to-work mode to using their own bikes could increase cycling’s modal share of commuting travel by 50%, a recent French research project suggests. The country’s government already subsidises pu
  • November 7, 2013
    Bit by bit insurers agree data protocol
    Telematics technology may be a game changer for the automobile insurance industry but it comes with some caveats as Colin Sowman discovers. James Bielak, (P&C) program manager at the US office of ACORD (the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development), has an unenviable job: to devise a standard form of communicating vehicle data between telematics providers and insurance companies. To that end he has gathered together a group composed of insurers, telematics providers and other intere