First train for Nhon-Hanoi Station metro route arrives in town

The Hanoi Metropolitan Railway Management Board (MRB) said that the four-car train will be unloaded, put on specialized vehicles and taken to the Nhon depot area in Hanoi the same day.

The process of unloading the train carriages at the Nam Hai Dinh Vu Port was expected to take about 4-5 hours. The transfer of the train to the depot will take place on Sunday and Monday night, officials said.

The train will be publicly displayed next month at the S1 station on Road 32, 15 kilometers from downtown Hanoi.

It will be tested for several months before the start of commercial operations next year, Nguyen Trung Hieu, deputy head of the MRB, had said earlier.

The remaining nine trains for the Nhon-Hanoi Railway Station route, which are being manufactured in France, are scheduled to get to Hanoi next year.

The Nhon-Hanoi Railway Station route consists of 10 trains, the first of which has four carriages each 80 meters long. The train, made with European standard aluminum alloy, manufactured by a French contractor, departed from France’s Dunkirk Port on September 2 and took more than a month to arrive in Vietnam.

Each train, which has a designed speed of 80 kph and a commercial speed of 35 kph, can carry 944 to 1,124 people. Its low floor makes it quite convenient for passengers to get on and off, especially for those with luggage or having to move on wheelchairs. There are priority areas for people with disabilities.

The train is colored green, red pink and white with an emblem of the Khue Van Cac, the Constellation of Literature pavilion inside the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, Vietnam’s first national university. In 2012, this pavilion was named an official symbol of the capital city.

According to MRB, the train's colors were inspired by rice and dragonfruit, Vietnam’s famous agricultural products. It took years for the design unit to choose colors that both represent Vietnam and the capital of Hanoi, and are also suitable for travel.

"In Europe, many do not know Ha Long Bay, but they do know the dragonfruit. When people saw the design, some said they guessed that this train was made for Vietnam," said an MRB representative.

The selection of the train’s design was also made after a survey by MRB in 2008 on opinions of more than 1,000 people of different ages, occupations and places of residence. More than 80 percent of interviewed people agreed with this design and over 90 percent said they were ready to use when the metro route begins operations.

The route will run 12.5 kilometers from Nhon in the western district of Nam Tu Liem, via Kim Ma Street to the Hanoi Railway Station in the downtown area. It will run 8.5 kilometers on elevated tracks and the remaining four kilometers underground. The underground section could be ready in 2023.

By early September, the route was 65 percent complete, including 80 percent of the elevated section.

Hanoi’s first metro, the Cat Linh-Ha Dong Metro Section, which runs 13 kilometers from downtown Dong Da District to Yen Nghia in the southwestern Ha Dong District, was in the final stage of safety evaluation in September, but a final deadline for commercial operation has not been set.