Ansaldobreda & Ansaldo STS: Twin Beacons on the Global Board

Source: Finmeccanica Magazine Transportation no.3

Ansaldobreda and Ansaldo STS are worldwide business partners in the United States, Japan, North Africa and China.

If you are on a train, or if you just took the tram into town, wherever you may be in this world there's a good chance that you're travelling on an AnsaldoBreda vehicle or a carriage that uses Ansaldo STS security and line control systems. These two Finmeccanica Group companies are unique in their international reach. They truly compete on a world market, sometimes pitting themselves against major industry multinationals alone, sometimes placing joint bids. For over a century and a half, AnsaldoBreda has been building industry-leading trains (to name but two, the ETR212 which on 20 July 1939 set the then world speed record 0f 203 km/h; or the ETR300 Settebello, built in 1952 and admired for its passenger elegance and luxury). Ansaldo STS has carved out a role as world leader in the design, construction and management of rail and metro signalling and traffic management. 

AnsaldoBreda and Bombardier recently joined forces to win an order from Trenitalia for 50 leadingedge high-speed trains. This commission is valuable not just in terms of the domestic market, but because it allows the company to strengthen its offerings on world markets where very high speed trains are set to be one of the biggest drivers of future growth. The company currently has around 2,400 employees at four factories in Italy (Pistoia, Naples, Reggio Calabria and Palermo). AnsaldoBreda has always been particularly projected onto the international market. For more than 30 years, the company has succeeded in the tough North American market, where it supplies trains to Boston, San Francisco and Cleveland, and has built a metro system for Washington (close to 800 of the 1,100 vehicles in circulation are manufactured by the company), Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company recently won a contract to revamp the vehicles in service in Buffalo, a $54 million five-year contract to reconstruct 143 trains in San Francisco, and the award (awaiting signature) of a contract to supply 60 new carriages for Miami's local metro system. 

Further south, in Brazil AnsaldoBreda has won an €86 million contract with the State of Cearà Infrastructure Secretariat to supply 20 trains for use on the SUL line, the first in a new 23 km "Metrofor" system linking the centre of Fortaleza and Maracanau. These trains have been developed on the platform used for the current Circumvesuviana trains in Italy. They are 40 m long and capable of maximum speeds of 120 km/h; the carriages are completely interconnecting, and the trains can carry up to around 450 passengers. Both companies have forged strong links with North Africa and the Middle East, two areas that are forecast to undergo major rail transport system development over the next few years, despite political turbulence in recent weeks in Tunisia and Egypt. 

AnsaldoBreda recently supplied 24 2floor trains to the Moroccan Railways, based on the TAF (Treno ad Alta Frequentazione or High Passenger Traffic Train) model, as part of a contract worth around €187 million. The ONCG is now operating these trains on its Casablanca-Rabat and Casablanca-Fez lines. Libya is building a brand-new railway network for which, as we shall see in greater detail below, Ansaldo STS has supplied a state-of the-art DMU developed on the platform adopted for the Danish IC4 train. 

In June 2009, in association with Ansaldo STS the company signed a major contract to build an automatic metro line in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is the same system that has been such a great success in Copenhagen in recent years. The €218 million contract is for an automatic metro system to serve the "Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman" women-only university. The system has one characteristic that makes it unique anywhere in the world: reserved for women only, darkened glass windows protect passengers from inappropriate stares. At the time of writing, the first train is undergoing tests in the Saudi capital. Thessaloniki (Greece) has also commissioned an AnsaldoBreda and Ansaldo STS automatic metro in an order worth a total of €300 million. Athens and the Turkish cities of Kayseri and Sansum have placed orders for Sirio trams. Built since 2002 on a modular platform, these trams have successfully gone into service in many cities in Italy (just a few months ago in Florence) and around the world. Thirty-five bidirectional vehicle have been purchased by Athens. Gothenburg has acquired 40 of these vehicles; a further 31 vehicles are due for 2013 delivery to the Hungarian city of Miskolc, and a further 13 have been ordered by Debrecen (also Hungary). The family has recently been expanded to include an order for a Tram Treno (developed from the Sirio) for the Genoa Casella railway. For AnsaldoBreda, this marks the company's entry into a new market that has already aroused a great deal of interest. In Europe, the Finmeccanica Group company is currently at the delivery stage of an order with a summer 2012 deadline for the V250 highspeed trains that will link Holland and Belgium, and IC4 and IC2 diesel trains for Denmark. The most interesting recent news for the company is without doubt, in the last few weeks, Ansaldo STS's winning bid to build a new automatic metro line in Copenhagen: the 16 km, 17-station contract is worth a total of around €700 million. Taipei has also chosen the team of Ansaldo STS and AnsaldoBreda to build its driverless Metro Circular Line, which will incorporate Communications Based Train Control (CBTC), the world's most advanced control system that Ansaldo STS is using in its projects for Brescia, Line C in Rome, the Thessaloniki metro and Milan's future Line 5. 

Ansaldo STS's most recent success was a contract to extend the new Milan line to San Siro: the agreement was signed on 2 February. The Finmeccanica Group company is divided into two business units (Transport Solution and Signalling) and operates as a main contractor and turnkey systems supplier worldwide. The company employs more than 4,300 people at 28 locations around the world. In 2009, the company generated revenues in excess of € 1.1 billion, and posted consolidated net income of €88 million. 

Ansaldo STS's signalling systems have been adopted on over 56% of all high-speed rail lines worldwide (excluding Japan).The company is an unrivalled world leader in level II ERTMS technology, the world's most advanced signalling system based on radio control and a mobile block concept. 

This Finmeccanica company supplies complete systems and services in Italy and for major rail networks around the world: in the United States, Spain, Belgium, India, China and South Korea. Ansaldo STS was in at the very start of the highspeed rail transport era: in 1981, the company built the very first highspeed signalling system (the TVM) for the very first French TGV line. In 2007, the company supplied a signalling system to Eurotunnel. The company recently won Libya's largest contract ever in value terms: €541 million to build signalling and control systems for the brand-new rail lines the North African nation is building. Ansaldo STS beat all of the rail industry's top competitors to win this 45-month contract. Ansaldo STS recently signed a major contract in Australia with the Rio Tinto private railway company to develop signalling systems and, above all, train and locomotive control automation. This agreement will lead to the world's first fully-automated traditional-type heavy railway. In the last few days, the company also finalized two contracts in the United States to install Automatic Train Control (ATC) signalling systems based on Ansaldo's MicroCab proprietary system on 100 vehicles for New Jersey Transit and another 364 vehicles for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. 

For more than 20 years now, Ansaldo STS has played a lead role on a number of projects in China. Among its projects, the company played a major role in the construction of a 505 km very high-speed (350 km/h) line between Zhengzhou and Xi’an. The company's international success is based on experience acquired from implementing the ERTMS system on Italy's high-speed rail network, and from the contracts it has fulfilled for a great many other rail and metro lines. 

As we have seen, one of Ansaldo STS's flagship products is the turnkey construction of light or heavy driverless metros. The system has two major strengths: fully integrated CBTD systems that guarantee bidirectional communications at high-speed between track and vehicle, and the company's ATC driverless technology. Ansaldo STS is also working with RATP France on three projects that leverage CBCT. 

Significant interest has also come from the Russían market, where Italian company has signed a contract with the Russian Railways to develop an ETCS variant adapted to the nation's railways. The Itarus system, as it is called, will upgrade the beacons between rails to satellites. The company's philosophy for the future is to operate as a general contractor and subcontract sectors such as telecommunications and energy provision to other companies in order to focus on core business.