No Russian-produced spare parts for the cars of Budapest’s Metro line 3 have been delivered in the last 30 days, and no specialists from the manufacturer Metrowagonmash (MWM) have arrived in Budapest from Russia.Continue reading
Due to the war situation in Ukraine, the replacement of the wheels of metro lines 2 and 4 has become uncertain, which may ultimately affect the schedule, Világgazdaság reports. The issue is that the treads of the Alstom Metropolis (AM) trains running on the affected lines wear out from time to time, which is a normal phenomenon. The Budapest Transport Company (BKV) will first try to repair the elements in need of repair itself, but if this fails, it will have to replace them.
This article was originally published on our sister-site, Ungarn Heute.
The wheels of the trains on the M2 and M4 lines are manufactured in Dnipro, Ukraine. However, the hometown of the industrial center is under heavy attack in the Ukrainian war, and it is also possible that the plant itself was bombed.
The procurement contractor Wheel Tires 2013 Ltd. is listed as a subcontractor of the Interpipe Group, a company based in Dnipro, a major Ukrainian industrial center that has been repeatedly attacked by the Russians since the outbreak of the war. The newspaper’s sources also ruled out the possibility that production would resume in the foreseeable future at this plant, which manufactures AM wheels and was also bombed by the Russians. Some of the workers at the plant, which employs about 10,000 people, have been drafted into the military, others have fled, and those who remain are making metal barriers to stop tanks instead of building subway wheels.
According to experts, the problem, in this case, could be more serious than in the case of Metro 3, where the Russian parts had to be replaced after they failed.
Sources: Világgazdaság, HVG
Featured photo by Zsolt Szigetváry/MTI