Our new Siemens SD160's are finaly arriving!

[tonyvdb]

Our new SD 160's have started to arrive here in my home city of Edmonton Alberta Canada.
These will be added to our already existing 36 Siemens U2 cars that are now 30 years old.

As our light rail system is set to open 15klm of new line in the next year. And apparently the government has just allocated another $40 billion to update and add to public transit over the next number of years it looks like our system will be expanding even more over the next few years

 

[Tokkyu40]

Good looking machines, too.
I see they were carried in by flatcar. Ours were hauled by truck.
Oh, the shame.

Claude

 

[tonyvdb]

Part of our main line runs along side the Canadian national RR and it is connected to it by a siding.
Its interesting as the 160s are about a foot taller than the U2 cars and the doors open to the outside on the new 160's. Sadly I wont be able to ride one until the late fall as thats when they will start carrying passengers.

 

[tonyvdb]

Edmonton transit celebrated its 100 year centennial this month and as part of the celebration they gave a tour this past weekend of the DL MacDonald LRT garage where they park and service all the Trains. I was honored to be one of the few that were allowed to photograph the inside of the garage and will have many photos available on my website by tomorrow of the new SD160s and older U2 cars including the shop where they do all the repairs and service the vehicles. I was even able to get photos of the underside, passenger area and inside cab of the new SD160s Edmonton is the first city in North America to get the new look SD160s.

Stay posted on this thread as I will post some of them here as well.

 

[tonyvdb]

As promised here are some pictures of the Open house including pictures of the new SD160's,

Here is a link to my webpage and many more photos and descriptions of the open house including larger pictures than seen here.

 

[Klinger]

Nice to see more light rail poping up around the world. Here in Denver, we are almost finished with our second order of SD-160's, we now have a total of 68 of them, along with 48 SD-100's. With FastTracks passed, we will be getting many more miles of Light Rail, as well as several Diesel commuter lines, and maybe even one or two electric commuter lines

Denver will look different in 2017

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Denver_In_2017.jpeg

 

[tonyvdb]

I agree, its good to see so many being set up. Ottawa Canada is in the process of building a line, I am surprised its taken this long for them.
Edmonton was the first city with a population under 1 million to build a Light rail system in 1977. We now have 38 U2 cars and once this order all here of the SD160's there will be 37 of them as well. There are already plans to buy another 20 of them.
The new SD160's that we are getting have a really nice streamlined front end and is not so boxy looking as the older 160's.