Well it was the Whitlam government that signed the Lima Declaration that
started the ball rolling on sending manufacturing overseas and importing
the products. I agree that we should be encouraging local manufacturing,
but the costs aren't always competitive and when it's a government
procurement, the extra cost is borne by the taxpayer and comes with an
opportunity cost of additional stock or other improvements to the public
transport system foregone.
According to Alstom, the basic cost of the G class trams is $10 million per
car. The $18 million figure would, I think, relate to including those
extras like the depot etc. Similar doublings of cost compared with ordering
from overseas often occur with passenger trains built in Australia, like
the 390 train cars to be built for Queensland Rail at Maryborough under the
Queensland Train Manufacturing Program. (During the last decade, Queensland
has also acquired 450 NGR suburban cars built in India, which would have
enabled QR to build up the numbers quickly.) Perth and Adelaide have
sourced electric trains from Maryborough or Melbourne, though Perth's C
series order or 246 cars is being built in Perth. When local manufacture
becomes a requirement in tenders, few will tender without a guarantee of
continuing repeat orders, otherwise all of the plant and equipment has to
be amortised over one job and the price of the product goes through the
roof. Then you end up with a situation like with Alstom at Dandenong, where
there is a monopoly local manufacturer, undermining the whole basis of
competitive tendering, and that manufacturer can charge what they like. All
of this gets charged to the public transport budget.
I think you can see the effects of a local manufacturing requirement in the
fleet-renewal/expansion outcomes in recent years. (Some of the overseas
orders include finishing and outfitting in Australia, some don't.) Over the
last decade (ignoring orders still in process), as far as I can determine,
425 suburban rail carriages and 100 tramcars have been built for Melbourne,
of which 308 carriages were built in China. I want to include Vlocitys too
because I believe they're regarded as interurban commuter trains, but I
can't find a breakdown for the last decade. At a calculated guess, there
are about 200 of these cars built over this time.. So that's about 600 or
so commuter rail carriages and 100 trams over the past decade.
In NSW, without the constraint of a local manufacture requirement, over the
last decade there have been acquired by the present government 934
suburban, metro and interurban rail carriages (from China, India and
Korea), 91 tramcars (from Spain) and 19 large to medium ferries (from
Australia, China and Indonesia). Some of these orders are still in
progress with more to follow. During this decade, another 636 suburban cars
were acquired from China, but I've separated them because they were an
order set in motion by the previous Labor government. If we include them as
actual products of the last ten years, that's 1,570 commuter rail
carriages, 91 tramcars and 19 ferries. (Compare with the actual outcome
record of the previous 15 years of Labor government of 220 train carriages,
5 medium ferries, no tramcars and no metro cars!)
So NSW's record of local manufacture of these major vehicles/vessels has
been pretty appalling over the last decade, but look at how much has been
acquired and how far the money went compared to Victoria - more than twice
as many rail carriages, almost the same number of trams, plus ferries on
top. And I'm sure Victoria's figure would have been much lower had they not
acquired the HCMTs from China but built them here. It's also not only the
cost, but the local manufacturing capacity too. Since we lost Comeng, the
capacity no longer exists for this scale of procurement within quite short
timeframes.
I've left buses out because, even though chassis and drive components are
invariably imported, at least we can body buses locally. I also haven't
mentioned the small fleets of trams in Gold Coast, Canberra and Adelaide,
all of which have been imported from Germany or Spain. Trams are simply not
viable to manufacture in Australia at a sensible cost, because of the low
volume and lack of continuity. So we get a situation where production has
to be drawn out in order to keep the plant running and the workforce and
suppliers usefully employed. A tram can normally be built in a fortnight or
less. How long does it take to build a tram at Dandenong for that fabulous
price? It's a dilemma for sure. Import them, get heaps for the money and
get them quickly, or manufacture them locally, get far less for the money
and wait far longer for them. What's the answer?
Tony P
On Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 12:14:50 UTC+10a...@... wrote:
> The other negative aspect of importing everything manufactured while
> exporting raw materials with no added value is the adverse environmental
> effects of dragging stuff around on these enormous ships that burn the
> worst, high sulphur, high CO2 emitting fuel that is available, kill more
> whales and other sea mammals than Japanese “scientific research” ever has,
> and dump containers full of whatever toxic filth they are carrying into the
> ocean during storms.
>
> But these are all considered inconvenient “externalities” by the
> perpetrators of this ecocide so the real cost of this global trade is
> concealed in the name of greed and, as always, the polluters get off free.
>
> Tony
>
> On 17 Aug 2022, at 11:23, Matthew Geier mat...@...>
> wrote:
>
> Are we able to compare like for like though?
>
> The G class contract price almost certainly includes the new depot and 20
> years of maintenance. There will be a premium for local manufacturers and
> yes it's not fair that the PT budget cops that cost, but the headline cost
> probably includes much more than the cost of the actual vehicle making
> direct comparisons difficult. And keeping those workers employed building
> them is probably cheaper than throwing them all on social security
> (although that comes out of a different pot of money). Although ultimately
> as a taxpayer, I pay either way.
>
> Mal has pointed out in the past that the G class contract includes handing
> over proprietary code and tools to the onboard computer systems to PTV. How
> much did Bombardlier jack up the price for that 'option'?
>
>
> On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 10:34, TP histor...@...> wrote:
>
>> This month's TAUT has an item that throws some rare insight into the
>> basic cost of a tram. Pilsen is ordering a new fleet of Skoda 40Ts, which
>> is a 30 metre design almost identical to the Melbourne E class. The price
>> has apparently risen 23% because of the current economic situation in
>> Europe - to $AUD 4 million per car. The discrepancy between this and the
>> $10 million label on a 24 metre G class car sort of puts it into
>> perspective. I agree about encouraging local manufacturing, but I have a
>> problem with the extra cost coming out of the public transport budget
>> because it means you get less than half as many trams for the money at a
>> time when you desperately need to replace old trams and/or increase the
>> fleet - or less of some other urgent public transport need.
>>
>> https://zdopravy.cz/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Tram_Plzen_3.jpg
>>
>> Tony P
>>
>> On Wednesday, 10 August 2022 at 20:50:21 UTC+10 Mick Duncan wrote:
>>
>>> Good one,Greg
>>>
>>> Cheers, Mick
>>>
>>>
>>> On 8/08/2022 4:37 pm, Gregory Robinson wrote:
>>>
>>> Yarra Trams got rid of route 69 so I guess F class would be out of the
>>> question.
>>> Adelaide had their F type.
>>>
>>> ------ Original Message ------
>>> On Monday, 8 Aug, 2022 At 10:25 AM, TPhistor...@...>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> When this thread started we didn't know what class the new trams were
>>> going to be, so we speculated that it would be F. Subsequently it was
>>> announced that they would be G class.
>>>
>>> Tony P
>>> (tripped up by the thread title himself)
>>>
>>> On Monday, 8 August 2022 at 09:30:14 UTC+10 trams4me wrote:
>>>
>>>> Was the F class designation for the new trams ever an official "thing"
>>>> or merely a gunzel affectation?
>>>>
>>>> All the official documentation refers to "G" class, thus named as "G"
>>>> is the seventh letter of the alphabet, the tram is seventh generation and
>>>> thus their numbers will be 7001 - 71xx.
>>>>
>>>> Yuri.
>>>> --
>>>> Gallery at https://tinyurl.com/trams4me
>>>> ----------------------------------------
>>>>
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