THE board of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (Septa) has approved the acquisition of 13 ACS-64 electric locomotives from Siemens as part of its budget for the 2015-16 financial year, which starts on July 1.

LETBANEN, the public company responsible for developing the tram-train network in the Danish city of Aarhus, revealed the final interior and exterior designs on June 1 for its fleet of 26 LRVs, which is being supplied by Stadler Pankow.

PLANS to extend Budapest metro Line 4 east from its current terminus at Keleti have effectively been abandoned after the municipal goverment voted instead to expand the city's tram network.

GERMAN Rail (DB) has decided to terminate the lease on the fleet of 13 class 605 ICE-TD inter-city DMUs used by Danish State Railways (DSB) on Eurocity services from Hamburg to Copenhagen and Aarhus.

COMMERCIAL services began operating on Marseille's third light rail line on May 30 with the opening of the 1.2km branch to Place Castellane, which extends the network into the south of the city.

RIFT Valley Railways (RVR), the concessionaire operating the 1160km Kenya Uganda Railway, managed to increase freight traffic by 24.3% last year.

BIDDING has opened for the track improvement project on Philippine National Railways (PNR), worth Peso 144.3bn ($US 3.2m), in an attempt to revive and improve Southeast Asia’s oldest railway system.

INECO has announced that it will undertake a feasibility study of a proposed Egyptian high-speed line, linking the cities of Cairo and Luxor. The 600km long corridor would connect the two largest cities of the country, with the aim of strengthening tourism infrastructure.

A consortium of Főmterv and Ecoroad has won the tender to prepare the detailed feasibility study for building the Hungarian section of the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed line. The study will cost Forints 527m ($US 1.8m).

PLANS have been announced by Eng Irit Shperber, director of transport planning in Israel's Transport Ministry, for the construction of a tram-train line between Haifa Lev-Ha-Migrate, Kiryat-Ata, Shefaram, and Nazareth.