Yokohama Loop Railway Orders 60 Linear Metro Cars

 Tokyo, March 1, 2005 – Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. today announced that it has recently received an order for 60 linear metro cars for the Yokohama Loop Railway (City Subway Route No. 4) from the Transportation Bureau of Yokohama City, the first new order in 35 years.

 The linear metro cars will be built at Kawasaki's Hyogo Works. The first two trains, each with four cars, will be delivered in fiscal year ending March 2007. After various tests, the remaining 13 trains will be delivered in the following fiscal year. Subway Route No. 4 is being built by Yokohama's Transportation Bureau and is scheduled to begin operating in 2007. It will feature 10 stations, connecting Hoyoshi and Nakayama, and be 13 km long,

 The linear metro cars are driven with linear motors, thinner than traditional motors, mounted under their bogies, and reaction plates laid on the railroad tracks. This enables the vehicles to be shorter and the diameter of the tunnels to be smaller, resulting in lower construction costs than on typical subway projects. In addition, Kawasaki's cars can operate on steep slopes because they gain thrust from the attraction and repulsion between the cars' linear motors and the reaction plates.

 Kawasaki boasts a track record of delivering linear metro cars to Osaka Municipal Subway's Nagahori Tsurumi-ryokuchi Line and Kobe Municipal Subway's Kaigan Line. Kawasaki also received a metro car order in 2004 from the Guangzhou Subway in China. The order from Yokohama is the result of such successful deliveries and the high repute of Kawasaki's technical capabilities.