ITALY’s infrastructure manager, Italian Rail Network (RFI) has awarded a €67m contract to Astaldi to complete a project to increase capacity in Genoa following its decision to rescind the previous contract after the original consortium exoerienced financial difficulties.

PROFITS at Netherlands Railways (NS) dropped considerably in 2017 to €24m from €212m in 2016 mostly due to the €41m fine imposed against the railway by Dutch regulatory body ACM for the irregularities associated with the Limburg regional tender, and the absence of real estate sales of €117m which helped to boost profits the previous year.

SIEMENS has signed an agreement to lease a 27-hectare site in Goole, northern England, to build a plant to manufacture and commission trains provided investment conditions are met and it wins sufficient orders for new trains.

ALGERIA’s minister of public works Mr Abdelghani Zalene officially opened the new Algiers Agha station for Algerian National Railways (SNTF) long-distance services on March 2, at an event which also marked the launch of SNTF’s new fleet of Alstom Coradia Polyvalent inter-city trains.

GERMAN Rail (DB) plans to increase spending on maintaining and modernising the existing 33,200km rail network, as well as investment in new projects, by €800m to a record €9.8bn in 2018.

STADLER Rail has been selected for a contract to supply 12 LRVs for the initial phase of the 40.4km interurban light rail network in Bolivia’s fourth largest city Cochabamba.

SIEMENS unveiled its new Smartron locomotive concept for the German rail freight market on March 1, pledging to simplify the procurement of new traction with an offer based on “one version, one contract, one price.”

STATE support for Via Rail’s Fleet Renewal Program was confirmed on February 27 with the publication of the Canadian government’s 2018 budget, which allocates funds to Transport Canada for the procurement of new trains for the Windsor - Quebec City corridor.

CAF, Spain, achieved a 12% increase in net turnover in 2017 which grew from €1.32bn in 2016 to €1.48bn last year. Vehicle sales also grew by 12% to €933m, while services saw an 8% increase to €377m.

THE first completed metro cars for the Jakarta MRT project arrived at the Japanese port of Toyohashi on March 1 in readiness for shippment to Indonesia.