Talgo

Talgo is a Spanish manufacturer of intercity, standard, and high speed passenger trains.

Corporate history

TALGO (Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol, Goicoechea-Oriol light articulated train), Alejandro Goicoechea and José Luis Oriol being the founders of the company.

Talgo Patents S.A. was first incorporated in 1942.

In March 2007 Talgo sold its Finnish rolling stock manufacturing subsidiary Talgo Oy to its local management and other Finnish investors. The company, which Talgo had owned for only seven years, reverted to its previous name of Transtech Oy. The company spends 10 to 12 percent of revenues on research and development, but the main revenue source is the Spanish railway operator Renfe.

Talgo made an initial public offering on the Bolsa de Madrid in May 2015. The IPO valued the company at €1.27 billion.

In July 2015, Talgo stated its intention to ship a train to India at its own cost as a demonstration on the Mumbai-Delhi rail route.

Design

Talgo trains are best known for their unconventional articulated railway passenger car that uses a type similar to the Jacobs bogie that Talgo patented in 1941. The wheels are mounted in pairs but not joined by an axle and the bogies are shared between coaches rather than underneath individual coaches. This allows a railway car to take a turn at higher speed with less swaying. As the coaches are not mounted directly onto wheel bogies, the coaches are more easily insulated from track noise. Talgo trains fitted with variable gauge axles can change rail gauge - for instance at the 1,668 mm Iberian gauge/1,435 mm standard gauge at the Spanish-French border interchange.

AVE Class 102

The AVE Class 102 or S-102 (nicknamed "Pato" in Spanish, because of its nose that looks like the beak of a duck, "pato" in Spanish) is a high-speed train used for the AVE service and operated in Spain by the state-run railway company RENFE. Outside of AVE service, Talgo markets this train as Talgo 350.

Further production of closely related trains, differing in seating arrangement resulted in the S-112.

Background, design and orders

The AVE Class 102 was constructed by Talgo with Adtranz (later Bombardier Transportation) providing the power car technology. It was principally designed for the Madrid-Barcelona line.

The trainsets consist of Talgo passenger cars modified in order to allow speeds of up to 350 km/h (220 mph) with power cars at each end. However, its certified maximum operating speed is 330 km/h (210 mph) due to the limits of its eight 1,000 kW (1,300 hp) motors. The trainsets can consist of up to 12 Talgo series VII coaches.

The train is nicknamed Pato, Spanish for duck, due to the aerodynamic design of the power cars resembling a beak. The beak design reduces noise created by air resistance at top speeds.

AVE

Alta Velocidad Española (AVE) is a service of high-speed rail in Spain operated by Renfe Operadora, the Spanish national railway company, at speeds of up to 310 km/h (193 mph).Alta Velocidad Española translates to "Spanish High Speed", but the initials are also a play on the word ave, meaning "bird". As of June 2013, the Spanish AVE system is the longest HSR network in Europe with 3,100 km (1,900 mi) and the second in the world, after China's.

AVE trains run on a network of high-speed rail track owned and managed by Adif, where other high-speed (Avant, Alvia) and mid-speed (Altaria) services also operate. The first line was opened in 1992, connecting the cities of Madrid, Córdoba and Seville. Unlike the rest of the Iberian broad gauge network, the AVE uses standard gauge. This permits direct connections to outside Spain through the link to the French network at the Perthus tunnel. AVE trains are operated by Renfe, but private companies may be allowed to operate trains in the future using other brands, in accordance with European Union legislation. Some TGV-derived trains do run on the broad-gauge network at slower speeds, and these are branded separately as Euromed.