Britain yesterday awarded a £1.2 billion (US$1.8 billion) contract to Japan’s Hitachi to build more high-speed trains at its new UK factory.
The British government said in a statement that it signed a deal for Hitachi Rail Europe to build 270 rail carriages at the new purpose-built plant in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, which is to employ 730 staff.
The Hitachi Class 800 series trains will become operational on the state-run East Coast Mainline — which links London with Leeds, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh — from 2019.
“This new order for Class 800 series trains is part of the government’s commitment to invest in our nation’s infrastructure,” British Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin said.
“This will not only deliver significant benefits to passengers by further slashing journey times and bolstering capacity, but will also stimulate economic growth through improved connectivity between some of Britain’s biggest cities,” he said.
The new order covers the design, construction, finance and maintenance of the trains over a 27-and-a-half-year period.
Last year, Britain agreed an initial order for nearly 600 train carriages with Agility Trains — a consortium of Hitachi and British partner John Laing — for an inter-city high-speed rail project.
Yesterday, it exercised an option for an additional 270 train carriages, bringing the total to 866.
“This follow-on order by the [UK] Department for Transport is great news for passengers on the East Coast Main Line who can look forward to quicker journeys traveling on high-quality trains, with more seats and passenger space, built to the latest safety standards,” Hitachi Rail Europe executive chairman and chief executive Alistair Dormer said.
“This order is a tremendous boost for Hitachi Rail Europe’s new factory with its 730 future employees in County Durham and for the British supply chain,” Dormer added.
“This order extends firm orders at the factory until the end of the decade with significant capacity remaining available for further UK and export contracts actively being pursued,” he said.
Hitachi recently signed a deal for the construction of the Newton Aycliffe factory, which will be operational from 2015 with full production starting in 2016.
Yesterday’s order is part of Britain’s £5.8 billion inter-city express program, which was launched in 2005 to replace the nation’s aging fleet.
The first batch of Hitachi Class 800 series trains will enter revenue-earning service on the Great Western Main Line in 2017 and on the East Coast Main Line in 2018.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained