Ural Locomotives has manufactured the first kit of 10 bogies for the 5-car Lastochka ES2G EMU, assembled by the Russian company.  A total of 33 high-speed Russian-built EMUs shall enter service in 2015.

The train certification testing shall be conducted in November. After the test runs are over and the Certificate of Conformity is granted all subsequently manufactured Lastochka EMUs (Type ES2G and other derived versions to be assembled by Ural Locomotives) shall be fitted with in-house produced bogies.

Ural Locomotives has made first arrangements for the bogie production in early 2013 by creating a dedicated Bogie Production Department and sending 50 of its employees off for training at the Siemens’s Bogie factory in Graz. Ural Locomotives has set up the manufacture of EMU bogies and is ready to begin volume production. This will enable Ural Locomotives to completely abandon the Lastochka bogies supplied for the time being by the Graz plant.

“The launch of our own in-house manufacture of train bogies is our further step in localization of Lastochka train production,” says Mr. Alexander Saltaev, Director General of Ural Locomotives. “Additionally, optimization of manufacturing processes is currently underway; the delivery and lead-in times are being reduced, while the volume production of bogies will significantly reduce the train cost.”