Two more trains arrive in HCMC to serve first metro line

The cars, which belong to the 12th and 13th trains of the line, were delivered at Khanh Hoi Port in the city’s District 4 like the previous cars.

They will be transported to Long Binh Depot in Thu Duc City in the next three-four days. Each car is 21 meters long, four meters high, and weighs 37 tons.

With the additional cars, 13 trains out of the line’s 17 have arrived in Vietnam. The made-in-Japan trains are designed with a maximum speed of 110 kilometers per hour on elevated sections and 80 kilometers per hour underground. Each train has three cars and is capable of carrying 930 passengers.

The 14th and 15th trains are expected to arrive late this month.

HCMC’s first metro line costs over VND43.7 trillion ($1.89 billion) and spans around 20 kilometers, starting from Ben Thanh Station in District 1 to Long Binh Depot. It has three underground and 11 elevated stations. The project was supposed to be completed at the end of 2021 and enter commercial operations in 2022, but was delayed due to impacts of the pandemic and other factors.

The project is now 89 percent complete and is expected to finish at the end of 2023.

Nguyen Quoc Hien, deputy head of the HCMC Management Authority for Urban Railways (MAUR), the project investor, said last month that the trains would run on a trial scheme along separate sections of the line before hitting the entire route by this year’s end.

The test run was originally slated for last year but due to the Covid-19 outbreak in the city, progress had fallen behind schedule.