Alstom’s Metropolis five-car trains start commercial operations in Panama’s Metro
The firsts modified Alstom Metropolis trains, from three to five cars, has started commercial operations on Panama’s Metro Line 1, as part of the contract[1] signed by Alstom in 2015, to supply 70 additional cars to the fleet of the city’s Metro.
The firsts modified Alstom Metropolis trains, from three to five cars, has started commercial operations on Panama’s Metro Line 1, as part of the contract[1] signed by Alstom in 2015, to supply 70 additional cars to the fleet of the city’s Metro.
The extension of Line 1 is achieved through a process known as retrofit, which began in November of 2015 and will end in 2019. In this process Alstom, in addition to supplying 6 new five-car trains, will extend the fleet by transforming three-car trains into five-car trains, resulting in a fleet of 26 trains of 5 cars. Thanks to this fleet extension, Panama’s Metro Line 1 will improve the mobility of more than 293 thousand passengers that use this line on a daily basis, increasing its capacity by up to one thousand passengers per train.
Besides this retrofit, Panama’s Metro also renewed its preventive maintenance contract with Alstom for the maintenance of the power and signaling systems as well as to the trains of Line 1, which includes a detailed plan to avoid the reliability and availability of the services offered to the users.
“Thanks to the retrofit process and to the preventive maintenance that Alstom preforms, our client and Metro users will be guaranteed of having a public transport system available, which meets the highest security and quality standards, as well as the support of Alstom as an expert of the railway industry”, said Jean-Michel Morvan, Project Director at Alstom.
The trains that run through Line 1 are from the Metropolis range, which is manufactured on Alstom’s plant in Santa Perpetua, Barcelona. One of the main advantages of these trains is their modularity, which permits to add new cars depending on the needs of the operator. On Panama’s case, the retrofit will also allow the interoperability between the Line 1 and the new Line 2 trains, connected through a linked track.
Alstom has been present in Panama since the beginning of the Metro Line 1 project in 2014 and has also been part of Line 2. In regional terms, Panama represents a milestone in the history of the company, having delivered the first metro system in Central America in a record time of 39 months.
