Germany's Siemens AG announced that it has got a contract to work with a Chinese partner in supplying 60 high-speed trains for China.

"In the next 15 years, China will lay 12,000-kilometer-long rail track for passenger trains. The signing of the deal marks another step of Siemens' market success in China," said Klaus Kleinfeld, chief executive of Siemens, in Shanghai on last Saturday.

The high-speed trains, named CRH3, will travel at a speed of 300 kilometers per hour. They will be first put into operation on the Beijing-Tianjin route starting in 2008.

The train with more than 600 seats is 200 meters long. The first three of the trains and the key locomotive parts will be designed and manufactured in Siemens' plant in Krefeld-Uerdingen, Germany. The rest of the trains will be built in the Chinese plantin Tangshan, north China's Hebei Province.

Siemens is a major supplier of subway cars, signal, power supply and telecommunications systems to the cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen in China. The Shanghai Transrapid Maglev Line undertaken by Siemens started operation in Shanghai last year.
 
(Xinhua News Agency November 14, 2005)