Foreign firms see profits in U.S. high-speed rail
By Paul Nussbaum
Inquirer Staff Writer
Third of four parts.
LA ROCHELLE, France - The train factory here on the Bay of Biscay was created in 1918 by the masters of the industry - the Americans - to build troop transports during World War I.
Today, French engineers, welders, and electricians work in the same long sheds for the French manufacturer Alstom Transport, building the great-great-grandchildren of those early trains - sleek tubes of aluminum that travel at 225 m.p.h. They hope their new customers will include the old bosses, the Americans.
About 500 miles south, near Madrid, the Spanish manufacturer Talgo is building high-speed trains with a novel tilting design to permit faster speeds on curves and a gauge-changing mechanism to accommodate different rail widths without stopping. The factory walls have pictures of Talgo's first train, built 60 years ago by American Car & Foundry Co. in Wilmington, Del.
Once the world's railroad leader, with train makers such as Philadelphia's own Baldwin Locomotive Works, the United States is now a backwater, dependent on foreign companies to fulfill its dreams of high-speed passenger rail.
The French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, or Chinese will provide the expertise that is a lost art in the United States. The countries that once relied on American ingenuity to build their trains now vie with one another to sell high-speed rail systems to the United States.
But, since U.S. law requires that the trains be built in the United States by American workers, foreign-owned train factories could mean thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for U.S. locales.
And the construction of bridges, tunnels, and stations around the country could mean work for tens of thousands more Americans.
Vice President Biden cited those jobs when he and President Obama announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail this year in Tampa, Fla.
"How can we, the leading nation in the world, be in a position where China, Spain, France - and name all the other countries - have rail systems that are far superior to ours?"
After noting how high-speed trains would reduce congestion, cut pollution, and increase productivity, Biden said: "Most important, we're creating jobs - good jobs. Construction jobs. Manufacturing jobs. And we're going to be creating them right now. We're going to spur economic development in the future and we're making our communities more livable all in the process."
A recent report by Boston-based Economic Development Research Group researchers estimated the number of jobs that U.S. rail spending would create: 24,000 construction and manufacturing jobs per $1 billion in capital investment, and 41,000 operation and maintenance jobs per $1 billion in operating investment.
In Spain, the government's ambitious push to build Europe's largest high-speed network has created 600,000 jobs in the last five years, according to officials of Adif, the Spanish rail-infrastructure firm.
That includes massive public-works projects such as bridges and tunnels, including a five-mile-long tunnel beneath the heart of Madrid to provide a high-speed rail connection between the city's two main train stations.
In La Rochelle, about 1,400 people work at the Alstom train factory, building equipment ranging from light-rail trams for Algiers and Jerusalem to the latest generation of high-speed trains for France and Italy.
Their pride and joy is the new AGV, the Automotrice à Grande Vitesse, or "high-speed self-propelled carriage," Alstom's newest entry in the high-stakes business of high-speed trains.
Introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy at ceremonies in La Rochelle in 2008, the 224-m.p.h. AGV is designed to compete with the newest German, Japanese, and Chinese trains.
Workers are completing their first AGV export order, 25 sleek, Ferrari-red trains for the private Italian railway operator NTV, which will start running the trains between Milan and Naples next year.
The order is worth $800 million ($1.8 billion, including maintenance contracts).
The AGV, unlike its predecessors, has no locomotives. The electrical power to drive the train is distributed among the individual cars. The result is a lighter, faster train, with the capacity to carry more passengers.
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