Railways / Germany: Diesel Multiple Units / Alstom Coradia LINT 54-81 (620/622)
Since 2011, the manufacturer Alstom is building "Coradia LINT" railcars with two bogies under each part of the car and a modified head design. They represent a further development of the LINT 27 / LINT 41-type railcars with Jacobs-type bogies, which were built since 1999. The two-part variant is referred to as LINT 54, the three-part variant as LINT 81 (the number indicates the length in metres).
Pictures of the LINT predecessor series are available → here.
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Public Transport / Germany / Jena
The city of Jena is located in the north-east of the German federal state Thuringia and has a population of 100,000. The trams run on metre-gauge tracks with a system length of some 25 kilometres.
Trams and city buses are operated by → Jenaer Nahverkehr GmbH ("JeNah").
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Public Transport / France / Clermont-Ferrand
In order to solve its traffic problems, the city of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne (about 450,000 inhabitants in the agglomeration) intended in the 1990s to revitalise its tramway, which had been abandoned in 1956. The decision was taken in 1996, but was revised following massive pressure from the city's largest employer, the tyre manufacturer Michelin. Now a mass transport system based on rubber tyres was demanded. The choice fell on the Translohr system. Due to the quarrels, completion was delayed until 2006. After two extensions, there is now one line with a length of about 15 kilometres. Meanwhile, there is so much dissatisfaction with the rubber-tyred trams that the decision is now regarded as a mistake even by politicians. The planned construction of a second line has therefore been shelved. A conversion of the existing line to a conventional tram is no longer being excluded but only when the vehicles have reached the end of their economic lifetime (around 2030).
The operator of the urban transport system is → T2C (Transport en commun de l'agglomération clermontoise).
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