Alstom, the supplier of trainsets for the Dubai Metro and Lines 4, 5 and 6 of the Riyadh Metro has inaugurated the Lucknow Metro, the first project for the company in Uttar Pradesh, India.
The French rail supplier was awarded the $179m (€150m) contract, which consists of an order for 20 metro trainsets, by the Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation (LMRC) in September 2015.
The trainsets, each four cars long and capable of seating 186 passenger, were designed by Alstom in Bangalore, Karnataka, and manufactured at Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, and Sri City, Andhra Pradesh.
The new metro line is around 23 km long and will include 22 stations, of which 19 are elevated and three are underground, and is expected to carry about 430,000 passengers per day initially, with a gradual increase in volumes to over 1 million by 2030.
The specific design of the Lucknow trains reflects the city’s cultural richness and harks to a number of its most famous monuments, including the Bara Imambara hall, Asifi mosque and Rumi Darwaza gate.
The project also includes Alstom’s Urbalis Computer Based Train Control, jointly supplied by Alstom’s sites in Bangalore and Saint-Ouen in France, and the second such signalling system installed in India after the first was rolled out in Kochi in June 2017.
On the  first day of operation of the Lucknow Metro, a technical glitch left one train of passengers trapped onboard for several hours. The incident followed the handover of the system to the LMRC, which has not implicated Alstom.
Alstom also has ongoing metro projects in cities including Chennai, Kochi and Lucknow, for which rolling stock is also being manufactured at the manufacturer’s facility in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh.
Urban signalling and infrastructure projects are also being undertaken by Alstom in Kochi, Lucknow, Bengaluru, Chennai, Jaipur and Delhi.
In the Middle East, Alstom handed over the first of 69 driverless trainsets bound for lines 4, 5, and 6 of the Riyadh Metro to the Arriyadh Development Authority in March 2017.
The complete order of metro trainsets, along with the infrastructure, is scheduled to be delivered by the end of 2018 – ready for testing ahead of the opening of the metro system in 2019.
March also saw the Expolink consortium led by Alstom take its latest step towards the extension of the Dubai Metro’s Red Line to the Expo 2020 site, by appointing Thales to provide the signalling.
Headquartered in France, present in over 60 countries and employing 32,800 people, Alstom recorded sales of $8.7bn (€7.3bn) and booked $11.9bn (€10.0bn) of orders in the 2016/17 fiscal year.
