Egypt’s Minister of Transport Kamel al-Wazir attended Tuesday the signing of a contract between the Egyptian Railway Authority (ERA) and Czechia’s Skoda to overhaul 280 train engines, carry out maintenance and supply parts for 15 years.
The train engines are divided into 218 Henschel-Wegmann units, and 62 Editranz units. The contract provides that two engines would be fully overhauled in Czechia in the presence of a number of Egyptian engineers and technicians to better transfer experience.
The rest would be overhauled at ERA’s Tebin workshops so that the local component would make up 25-40 percent of parts installed for 138 train engines, while the percentage would go up to 50 percent in the remainder of the units. There is also a target for Egyptian workers to compose 90 percent of labor involved in the overhauling process.
With regard to parts within maintenance works, locally-manufactured ones are set to compose 40 percent and gradually increase to become 60 percent.
Minister Wazir stated that the development of railways in Egypt is aimed at achieving a daily transport capacity of two million passengers by 2030, as well as 13 million tons of freight yearly.
