Andrés Arizkorreta, CEO of CAF recently met with Welsh First Minister, Carwyn Jones and Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport, Ken Skates, to update the Government on progress for the construction of the brand new factory.
As works on the new factory advance, CAF plans to start recruiting people to work at the factory this spring, and will be offering training and apprenticeship schemes from autumn 2018.
CAF looked at more than 100 locations throughout the UK before choosing Celtic Business Park, a 100-acre industrial development on the site of the Llanwern steelworks. The location was chosen because of its links to roads, rail and ports, as well as the availability of local people with engineering skills.
In July 2017 CAF announced that it would build a state of the art factory at the Celtic Business Park site in Newport South Wales, creating over 300 new jobs for the Welsh economy.
The factory site will be over 46,000 square metres in size and is being designed to ensure that CAF has the flexibility to build a range of different trains there, including trams, suburban and inter-city metro trains and high-speed trains. The floor area is 15,000m2 – equivalent in size to two Cardiff Principality rugby pitches, with an internal volume of 167,125m3 which would hold 1,500 double decker buses. Some 3,500 precast concrete piles have been installed to support the structure which if stacked end to end vertically, would be four times the height of Mount Everest. In addition, over 10,800m3 of excavated material has been reused on the site, avoiding 1,350 wagon movements on local roads.
“The factory will have the flexibility to allow us to respond to the exacting demands of both existing and new customers by providing the most complete offering of any rolling stock provider operating in the UK,” Richard Garner, CAF’s UK Director said.
Current CAF’s contracts in the UK market involve the construction of 300 trains and coaches including the delivery of the new Caledonian Sleeper, TransPennine Express, West Midlands Trains and Northern fleets.
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