THE Viamobilidade consortium, led by CCR Group, won an auction on January 19 for the 20-year concession for São Paulo metro Line 5-Lilac and monorail Line 17-Gold.

ITALY’s open-access high-speed operator Italo-NTV achieved a 24.8% jump in operating revenue in 2017 to €454.9m compared with €364.4m in 2016 partly due to a 15.3% in traffic from 11.1 million passengers in 2016 to 12.8 million last year.

CHINA’s urban rail trackage surpassed 5000km at the end of 2017, according to statistics published by the China Urban Rail Transit Association.

SEOUL Metro, the operator of metro lines 1-8 in the Korean capital, has signed an agreement to support the construction and operation of an urban rail line in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang.

CALIFORNIA High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) named Mr Brian Kelly as its new CEO on January 17, the same day it received a new report that found delays and higher-than-expected costs would inflate the price of the project by $US 2.8bn.

THE president of Rwanda Mr Paul Kagame and his Tanzanian counterpart Mr John Magufuli signed an agreement in Dar es Salaam on January 14 pledging to press ahead with the construction of a standard-gauge line which will connect landlocked Rwanda with the Indian Ocean.

SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) is set to introduce its first Fleet of the Future cars into passenger service within the next few days after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) granted conditional approval for public use of the vehicles.

TELEVIC Rail, Belgium, is participating in a research project which is aiming to identify new ways of mining data retrieved from sensors installed onboard trains with the objective of developing a predictive maintenance tool.

PASSENGER operations began on January 18 on the two-line Optics Valley Tramway network, which serves the Donghu New Technology Development Zone southeast of Wuhan.