Light Rail

The European Investment Bank is providing £465 million to finance the design, construction and commissioning of Section II of the Bucharest Metro Line 5 to develop a new east-west underground public transport corridor in the Romanian capital. EIB Vice-President Wilhelm...

Bombardier Transportation has won an order to supply an additional 78 BOMBARDIER FLEXITYSwift high-floor light rail vehicles (LRVs) and 10 FLEXITY Classic trams to the Frankfurt Transport Authority, VGF in Germany. The new LRVs are scheduled to be delivered between January 2014 and June...

The 'very challenging' task of introducing a new tram management system on to the Metrolink network has led to revisions to the schedule for new lines opening. Transport for Greater Manchester's £1.4 billion expansion of the Metrolink network is the...

Drivers in the West Midlands can enjoy a festive tipple without the risk of drink driving by taking advantage of extensive public transport services this Christmas and New Year. With police last week launching a Christmas crack-down on drink driving,...

U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has sealed two agreements providing $900 million in federal funds to extend Houston’s major light rail system by an additional 12 miles. The two projects being funded, the North and Southeast lines,...

Manchester’s Metrolink first opened in April 1992, running from Altrincham to Manchester city centre and on to Bury. This was the first of the second generation light rail networks to emerge in Britain’s cities and building such systems was, at that time, an unknown quantity. A consortium, with GEC, Mowlem and Amec as the main [...]

The Tyne and Wear Metro has been completely closed due to today's public sector pensions strike action. Nexus has told Metro passengers that there will be no replacement bus services and Metro tickets will not be accepted on buses in...

For several years, the mass rapid transit (MRT) system in the German city of Karlsruhe and its surrounding region has been the subject of an interesting transportation initiative. Continuous expansion of its network, with constantly increasingly passenger numbers, has proved the “Karlsruhe Model” to be a success. A total of 19 mass transit companies, including [...]

Dubai is home of the world’s first 7 star hotel in the Burj Al Arab, the world’s tallest building in the Burj Khalifa Tower, and the world’s longest fully-automated passenger metro system. Dubai doesn’t know the meaning of anything less than world class so when the rail engineer heard they had opened their second metro [...]

Issue 84 (October 2011) of the rail engineer magazine included a report on the world launch of the new BOMBARDIER FLEXITY 2 tram at Blackpool. That article was based around the new tram ready destined to be used on the network from Starr Gate, at the south end of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, north to Fleetwood. [...]