INDIAN Railways (IR) has awarded Madhepura Electric Locomotive (MELPL), its joint venture with Alstom, a €62m contract to maintain 300 WAG-12B electric freight locomotives. These are the final units to be delivered from a contract for 800 worth €3.5bn and awarded by IR to Alstom in 2015.
Running until February 2031, the new contract covers all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance required to meet availability and reliability targets. It includes the supply of materials, logistics, remote diagnostics and locomotive washing.
The 300 WAG-12B locomotives will be maintained at IR’s Sabarmati locomotive depot, complementing the existing depots at Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh state and Nagpur in Maharashtra which maintain the first 500 locomotives manufactured by Alstom at Madhepura in Bihar.
Under Alstom’s FlexCare Perform maintenance package, which includes depot infrastructure, response teams will be equipped with specialised tools and essential spares to minimise downtime and stationed at strategic locations across the network. Alstom will also continue its skills development programme under the new contract, having trained over 22,000 IR staff to date.
Designated the Prima T8 by Alstom, the double-section WAG-12B is rated at 9MW and can haul 6000 tonnes. The fleet has been deployed on the Eastern and Western Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC) developed in India over recent years.
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