Russia: The procedure is planned to be held within six months. The Moscow Metro as the customer has published the refusal to fulfill the contract for the trams supply by the Sinara – Transport Machines (STM) trading house subsidiary.
The reason is the failure to meet the delivery deadlines. Instead of the 30 trams that should have been delivered, only one was handed over. The Moscow Metro also demands from STM to return 257.2 mln RUR ($3.4 mln USD) of an advance payment.
In the beginning of October 2020, the STM trading house subsidiary won the tender to supply 90 one-car low-floor trams and provide its maintenance for 30 years. The company competed with another Russian producer, PC Transport Systems (PC TS), and offered the lower price by 0.5% gaining the contract for 11.07 bln RUR (approx. $150 mln USD). The first 5 trams were planned to be delivered in June 2021. But initially Moscow held a tender for the supply and maintenance of 130 single-section and 74 three-section trams and later it was divided into two: a contract for 90 trams was awarded to STM and a 114 trams contract worth 22.15 bln RUR (approx. $300 mln USD contract) for 114 trams – to PC TS as the only participant in the auction.
Earlier, In 2019, STM formed a joint venture for the urban rolling stock production with the Czech producer, Skoda Transportation. It was announced to invest 1.5-2 billion RUR ($20-27 mln USD) in the development of the joint venture’s production facilities at the plants of Vagonmash in St. Petersburg and Kalugaputmash in Kaluga. A prototype tram was planned to be delivered in 2021. But it is worth noting that there was a significant alienating between Russia and the Czech Republic in April 2021 due to accusations of the Russian side’s involvement in the explosion at military warehouses in the Czech Republic in 2014.
At the end of October 2020, the published contract showed that it is planned to supply trams of 71-415 model from another producer, Uraltransmash (a member entity of Uralvagonzavod). The Sinara Group reported that 71-415 will be the base platform of Moscow tram and STM will take part in final technological operations of its production.
However, in January 2021, STM changed its partner: now it was supposed that the base platform will be supplied by Ust-Katav Car-Building Plant (UKCP). UKCP had just produced its first one-car low-floor 71-628 tram that had started trial operations. STM noted that UKVZ is able to provide the most flexible approach in the implementation of appropriate technical solutions.
71-628M tram in the street of Moscow. Source: Dmitry Kasatkin, transphoto.org
The design of the 71-628M tram was presented in June 2021, and in early September the first unit arrived in Moscow. STM’s CEO Viktor Lesh reported that the delivery time had been adjusted as STM jointly with UKCP and the Moscow Department of Transport were designing the interior and exterior of the tram and serial production had already been launched. According to information from UKCP, 14 more trams are now ready to be shipped to Moscow.
In terms of contract termination STM stated, that the 71-628M tram development required additional time, and the pandemic situation negatively affected on increased periods of necessary components delivery. The President of PC TS Felix Vinokur also spoke about the difficulties caused by increased components delivery time for the orders execution. At the same time PC TS was able to deliver all 40 one-car trams by the end of July, much earlier than the contact’s deadline at the end of October.
Notably, in July this year, the UKCP CEO Roman Novikov claimed that the manufacturer plans to independently participate in further tenders for trams supply. Currently UKCP is constructing a new tram assembly line that should increase its annual production capacity to 220 trams.
