As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, the Zagreb company Altpro is currently working on a monorail transport connection between Cairo and two new satellite cities, one of which will become the country’s new capital.
Namely, as Tin Viduka, a member of the Management Board of Altpro in charge of sales and marketing, explained, this is one of this company’s biggest projects, which they entered into with their long-term global partners – Bombardier and Alstom. Although they aren’t currently allowed to talk about the financial aspects of it all due to the confidentiality of the contract, they emphasise that this is a significant and very far-reaching project.
“This project is very important to us because, in addition to entering a new market with great potential, it involves a new technology that we’ve been developing for a long time now. In this business, we participate with signaling systems for infrastructure that guarantee high reliability and improved security. Our axle counting systems for single-track rails are currently unique in the field of control and detection of non-standard train types. Speed sensors, direction sensors and the position of single-track trains exchange this vital information with other infrastructure subsystems,” said Viduka, the son of the founder and CEO of the Zagreb company Altpro, Zvonimir Viduka.
The company explained that there are two monorail lines in Egypt, spanning a total length of about a hundred kilometres.
The first of them, spanning 54 kilometres, will connect eastern Cairo with the new administrative capital, currently called the “New Capital City” and should have almost seven million inhabitants living in it, and the second line of 42 kilometres will connect the Cairo suburb of Giza with a new city officially named the “6th of October City ”.
This somewhat unusual name for the city, which already boasts about half a million inhabitants, is actually named in memory of October the 6th, 1973, when the 4th Arab-Israeli War, better known as the Yom Kippur War or the Ramadan War, began. It was an armed conflict fought from the 6th to the 25th of October 1973 between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria.
Egypt stood out during the conflict, as, instead of sending in soldiers and tanks, it put water engineers in the forefront and occupied Suez and the whole of Sinai.
However, due to unrealistic changes in the plans which almost did succeed in bringing Israel to its knees, the whole campaign collapsed and Israel surrounded and destroyed the Arab forces, coming in tanks in front of Cairo and Damascus, which resulted in US and USSR involvement in the crisis.
However, October the 6th remains a big date and Armed Forces Day in Egypt today. Both lines are expected to open in 2023 and will be able to carry about 45,000 passengers per hour in each direction.
Travel time will be significantly reduced to about 60 minutes for the first line and about 42 minutes for the second. The Cairo Monorail will use 70 fully automated Bombardier INNOVIA Monorail 300 trains, ie ones without a train driver, which will be produced in Derby, England.
Business for the Zagreb company Altpro in Los Angeles
The Zagreb company Altpro’s impressive reference list also includes a project at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). It involves the delivery of a control system for the APM (Automatic People Mover) train used to transport passengers within the airport itself. The delivery currently includes state-of-the-art technology for the management and detection of trains of specific dimensions and requirements.
Although the financial results for last year are not yet known, the company states that 2021 was a record year for them and that they expect double-digit revenue growth compared to the previous record year od pandemic-dominated 2020, when they achieved about 70 million kuna in revenue.
“We have three big projects and a number of smaller ones under our belts, and we expect double digit growth this year as well. Along with India and now Egypt, after a long lull, the Croatian railway market has finally opened up again. A lot is being invested in infrastructure and new railway vehicles. We’re mostly engaged in the section of the Krizevci-Koprivnica-Hungarian border railway, and where we’re actually a system integrator with consortium partners – we produce, deliver and install the equipment. We expect that this growth of the Croatian market will continue in the next period as well,” believes Viduka.
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