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Old 10th July 2013, 00:50
Myrtonos Myrtonos is offline  
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Melbourne, Victoria
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Curves, grades and low floors

The Transtech tram is one of those pivoting bogie low floor trams with ramp access to the floor over the bogies. Skoda transportation, who also bided for Helsinki also produces such a tram called the ForCity. Both the Prague and Riga variants have the same number of bogies and the same number of carbody sections as Trantech's model, the major difference is that the centre bogies of the ForCity are right under the articulation. Alstom has produced a similar design for Istanbul called the Citadis X04, with a fixed centre bogie under a short centre section. Both such designs, being built for standard gauge track, have low floors over the bogies than Transtechs design.
So why are the tramways of Helsinki built to metre gauge? Given that the local railways are built to a much wider gauge, similar to the Russian railway gauge and all but three of the street tramway networks in Russia are also built to their national railway gauge, as are many other tramways in the former USSR.
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