Renovation of railway carriages bought from Spain has ‘95% national content’ – PM
Prime minister António Costa said on Friday that the renovation of the passenger carriages bought from Spain has "95% national content".
Prime Minister, António Costa, said on Friday that the renovation of the passenger carriages bought from Spain, which is being done in the workshops of Guifões, in Matosinhos, has “95% national content”.
“In each of these carriages there is 95% national content, 95% of what the Spanish considered as scrap in these new carriages was produced in Portugal,” he said during the presentation of the ARCO carriages at the Guifões Workshop Park in Matosinhos, in the Porto district.
Overall, he added, around 50% of Portuguese companies produced components for the modernisation of the carriages.
Portugal’s train operator, Comboios de Portugal (CP), which reopened the Guifões workshop in January 2020, “has become a real locomotive for an important economic sector in our country,” the PM said.
Closed in 2011, the Guifões workshops reopened in January 2020 with the purpose of ensuring the maintenance of the rolling stock that is in service of CP, repair of what is stopped and modernisation of trains.
Since then, Costa revealed, 67 railcars, locomotives and carriages have already been upgraded.
The government has approved a tender for the acquisition of 117 new electric railcars by CP, worth €819 million, the “largest purchase in the history” of the operator, Infrastructure and Housing Minister Pedro Nuno Santos said on July 15.
The tender was approved by the Council of Ministers and the government expects the first train to arrive in 2026 and that all the trains will be in circulation in 2029.
At today’s ceremony, which was also attended by Pedro Nuno Santos, the Prime Minister also expressed the hope that Portugal will once again produce trains and, perhaps, export.
“If we learn to make trains, we will supply not only the country, which would be important because it would save a lot of imported material, but who knows if we could also start exporting to other countries,” he added.
Costa said that Portugal wants to “give muscle” to the rail industry.
