Siemens AP 220 Production, Delivery and Acceptance: Brightline West Trainsets

The only numbers for that claim come from Boeing, and the ITC's ruling in favor of that claim is so heavily redacted it can't be used to understand why the ITC agrees with Boeing. Trusting that number would be like trusting EMD to know what Wabtec's costs are -- EMD doesn't know those numbers, and shouldn't know those numbers.

The Airbus Mobile plant has a long history going back to the farce that was the Air Force tanker contract, which gets briefly name checked in “the West Wing”. The furious lobbying which resulted in Boeing’s “Frankentanker” being chosen delayed the plant until 2015 when they had enough orders to send A320 assembly there.

Presumably the things that would interest Siemens in NY state would be:

1. Opportunity to poach experienced workers from CAF, Alstom, and Alstom (Bombardier) that aren’t interested in moving south or south west. Some Novabus assembly workers just laid off in Plattsburgh might also switch to building railcars.

2. Positioning for follow on orders to Avelia if Amtrak wants more HS trains and doesn’t want to give Alstom the work

Seems thin on both counts though. Siemens need to concentrate on ensuring quality builds out of the Carolinas rather than ending up with what Boeing did in that region.

eolesen wrote: ↑Mon Jun 17, 2024 8:09 pm
Boeing and Airbus built their newest plants in Alabama and South Carolina.

Do I need to go on? This isn't about politics, it's about economics.

Something makes me think both the Boeing executive corps and shareholders would like a do-over on their Charleston 787 plant purely for economic reasons.

[this statement in no way implies that 787s and HSR trains are the same level of complexity]

eolesen wrote: ↑Sat Jun 22, 2024 4:54 am This is no different from what CRRC was proposing to do with railcar production - heavy subsidies from a foreign government to win orders and undercut competition.

Oh yeah, and look at how CRRC is doing these days. Can't fulfill an order and when they do, spotty work.

RandallW wrote: ↑Sat Jun 22, 2024 6:25 am . Trusting that number would be like trusting EMD to know what Wabtec's costs are -- EMD doesn't know those numbers, and shouldn't know those numbers.

This is what makes me think you really don't understand any of this. EMD does know those numbers, and so does Boeing. EMD likely owns 3-4 GE locomotives that were disassembled and cataloged in a back building away from prying eyes. Boeing has probably disassembled more than one A320. They have the same or similar suppliers, so it is not hard to buy a secondhand competitive product, take it apart, and find the cost. They can bring in a few trusted engineers and purchasing people and come up with a pretty accurate guess of what things cost.

There is a famous case where Ford took apart a competitive British product, the Morris Minor, and figured out there is no way they made money on that car ever, even when Morris thought they were. I've had this happen personally when GE (not locomotives) took apart my product and shipped it to a team of their aero engineers in Cinci. They confronted us with a scenario wherein we could make it 35% cheaper and we had to defend our price.

Long story short, if you think this is a polite game wherein GM, EMD, Airbus, Boeing, etc.. don't know all about this stuff, its really hard to have this discussion because you don't have the perspective of how manufacturing and heavy industry works. It makes products more cost effective and also safer.

Indeed. This is how airlines work as well. United, Delta and Southwest all know each other's cost structure. In a business where margins are in the pennies it matters to know where you can and can't undercut the competition.

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I admittedly work in a company that is exclusively business-to-business and business-to-government, so retail sales aren't a thing, and we know all our competitor's list prices, but we don't know the size of discounts they offer, so we don't know the actual value of most sales. We do have a sense of how often they discount (about 85% of the time), but since every company in our line of business hasn't been public for at least the past 25 years, internal financials are somewhat opaque.

Ford acknowledges that its overhead is often 25% greater than its competitors, so if their concern was that they couldn't make that care without a loss, I'll accept Morris's statement that they didn't take a loss making the Mini.

I would have thought that if Boeing really thought the A220 was sold below it's cost, they would have continued to pursue that case against Airbus instead of dropping their complaint the moment production moved into the USA since they could continue to pursue their claims against Airbus for engaging in predatory pricing within domestic courts in the USA. As I have found sources that suggest Airbus will never make a profit on the A220 program, I find it odd that Boeing would only be concerned about the A220 being dumped it were produced in Canada.

That's what I mean about EMD not being able to know what Wabtec's costs are -- EMD knows how much it would cost EMD to manufacture or procure a part that Wabtec uses, and they may even be close to Wabtec's costs, but EMD really won't know how much it costs Wabtec to manufacture or procure that part unless that were revealed in a court case, and absent that certainty could be quite off for specific parts.

I have gone through that exercise a few times, but in the cases of small computing parts, those differences always come down to guarantees of country of origin of the part (i.e., ensuring the parts in a Dell laptop are made in Taiwan instead of China can carry a significant premium on the laptop).

Boeing's complaint was never with Airbus. It was against Bombardier based on their cost structure and the subsidies they were getting from Quebec.

Once Airbus entered the equation, the question of subsidies was essentially over.

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-new ... -facility/

Brightline West unveils high-speed train renderings, announces NY facility

...
Brightline West released renderings of a train set, lounge car, and Rancho Cucamonga train station. The company also announced the building of its rail production facility in New York.

The site will be dedicated to producing the nation’s first high-speed train sets, specifically, the American Pioneer 220 (AP220), which will serve Brightline West, connecting Las Vegas to Southern California. Production at the Horseheads facility is expected to begin in 2026.

The site will span nearly 300,000 square feet, creating around 300 jobs. It includes roles for electro-mechanical assemblers, quality management, quality control, industrial production and test engineers, project management, supply chain management, and logistics employees. The AP 220 will be designed for operational speeds of up to 220 miles per hour.
...

Didn't Siemens manufacture the Brightline trainsets in CA? Now they are going to manufacture CA trainsets in NY? Obviously they are doing this for the tax breaks. Is 300,000 sq ft big enough for train manufacture? Is this factory for coaches and locomotives? Are these carbon-fiber or fiberglass bodies, or stainless or steel? Where is the sheet metal "stamping" plant?

BandA wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2024 12:00 pm Didn't Siemens manufacture the Brightline trainsets in CA? Now they are going to manufacture CA trainsets in NY? Obviously they are doing this for the tax breaks.

Also for the "made in NY" incentive that will help them on MTA contracts.

Siemens likely would have gotten similar tax breaks almost anywhere else. Since Siemens already has 8 manufacturings sites in 6 states (9 in 7 if including the NC plant being built), and would be shipping lots of subassemblies or components from those locations to wherever final assembly occurs, it makes sense for them to add another state to the portfolio, since clustering every plant together increases the likely hood of a single natural disaster disrupting all manufacturing activity.

It looks like the announcement was made in a rail served industrial park with ready to build sites.

I looked up Horseheads, NY. It's between Corning and Elmira in Chemung County, which officially puts it in Appalachia and possibly qualifies it for additional government incentives.

markhb wrote: ↑Fri Sep 13, 2024 12:37 pm I looked up Horseheads, NY. It's between Corning and Elmira in Chemung County, which officially puts it in Appalachia and possibly qualifies it for additional government incentives.

Not far from CAF in Elmira. Of the passenger rail equipment plants in NY State, three are in counties that are members of the Appalachian Regional Commission: the other being Alstom (Hornell). Kawasaki is in Yonkers, and BBD/Alstom in Plattsburgh, though the former choose Yonkers thanks to PANYNJ financing and incentives.

I wonder if the Pittsburgh Siemens facility (Munhall, formerly East Pittsburgh) producing control equipment for rail rolling stock was former Westinghouse.