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Houston, USA: New Low-floor Light Rail Vehicles with Inverter Technology from Vossloh Kiepe

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Houston is the second city in Texas to have an urban railway system (Dallas being the first). Now Houston will be expanding its route network with four new lines and a total route length of twenty miles. In order to the service these five urban railways, Metro Houston will expand their vehicle fleet by an additional 103 low-floor light rail vehicles which the Spanish vehicle manufacturers CAF will be producing in their US factory in Elmira, NY.

Vossloh Kiepe will supply CAF with the traction converters, vehicle power supply and auxiliary converters as well as the brake resistors. The Vossloh Kiepe technology is completely built into roof-mounted equipment enclosures, two of which are housed on each of the roofs of the five-section low-floor vehicles. Four high-performance IGBT direct pulse inverters supply the eight drive motors with sufficient traction up to the vehicle’s top speed of 70 km/h. Using this proven IGBT technology, Vossloh Kiepe will also supply the components for the DC vehicle onboard power supply system and for supplying the 3-phase AC-consumers, as well as air-conditioning systems and fan motors.

Just like the CAF vehicles, the traction systems supplied by Vossloh Kiepe will also be produced in the USA. The vehicles are to be delivered to Metro Houston sometime between April 2012 and the summer of 2014.

Düsseldorf, February 2010

Contact:
Martin Schmitz
Vossloh Kiepe GmbH
Tel.: 0211/7497-266
Email: m.schmitz@vkd.vossloh.com