Almaty: Big win for Severn-Lamb (6/24/04)

 

Midland, England. Severn-Lamb will soon join the "big kids" of monorail manufacturing with a deal to build a $451 million monorail for Almaty, the capital city of Kazakhstan. If the deal goes through, Severn-Lamb will spend the next five years building 46 trains, each with six cars. The Almaty Monorail will have 50 miles of track. Heinz Roosen, managing director of Severn-Lamb, said "This is a massive project and we will definitely be needing some help with it." The system is being financed by a group of American financiers, who will operate it for the first ten years. Severn-Lamb has supplied peoplemover-scale monorails in Italy and Malaysia, but the Almaty system will include new, larger trains that feature walk-through capability. Roosen said "It's like having a BMW Series 3 and now we've gone straight to the Series 7." Almaty started building a subway system ten years ago but abandoned the project because it became too expensive.