Better late than never.
Anyway do you think that decades or even at the start of the last decade it made much sense for an extremely poor country like BD to try to assemble and then manufacture it's own train carriages since demand was rather low?
As has already been explained by posters like
@Bilal9 it would have been far more expensive for BD years ago to try to get ToT and then assemble those train carriages in BD with a view to manufacture later on. BD would have needed to place an order for many potentially billions of US dollars that it simply did not have.
India can do it as it has vast scale despite the fact that it has been a poor country and Indonesia not only has higher population but also was and still is much richer than BD.
The difference now is that BD is a wealthier country compared to before and it is finally able to spend serious amounts of money on infrastructure compared to only 10 years ago - 6% as opposed to 3% of GDP.
BD is now in a position where it can spend 10 billion dollars or more on a single project(Roopur nuclear plant or this proposed "bullet-train" line from Dhaka to Chittagong).
I hope that even though BD government can somehow find the money to fund this 12 billion US dollar line, it instead follows my line of thinking in upgrading all city-connecting railway lines to maybe 160km/h maximum and then works with a country like Indonesia to get ToT to build the carriages that will be required for these newer upgraded lines - think there is already discussions about something similar as mentioned by
@Nike.
Manufacturing High speed railway coaches is not difficult, given a proper technology partner. What is interesting, is that starting with assembly, it is also significantly cheaper to buy for existing Railway like BR in our case. Later we can reduce imported components substituted with local ones and do manufacturing from raw sheet steel or sheet aluminium/aluminium profiles for welded framework. Some components (like wheels and bogie components) may need to be imported for a while before demand shifts the manufacture to locally made bogies.
I am suggesting, like other countries, that this JV company should not have any influence from BR itself. BR administration is too corrupted and can't be relied on - not to influence manufacture of products using low quality components using cheap shortcuts.
One of the most appropriate foreign technical partners for this proposed railway coach manufacturing company, besides PT INKA, is Hyundai Rotem.
We already have a strong relationship with this company as a vendor of our modern Meter Gauge locomotives, which we have quite a few of, supplied over the last two and a half decades. Rotem manufactures most high speed rail coaches for Korea Rail, which has four different classes of rail service, from slowest to fastest non-stop. The fastest rail coach in Korea was/is identical to the French TGV and slowly, local indigenous content has been raised to near 100% for electrical locomotive power for these Bullet trainsets.
Needless to say, rail-coaches themselves in Korea are all locally manufactured by Rotem, which we can also do, given proper setup. This is not at all difficult, given local expertise and available skillsets such as for building ships in our over two hundred plus large shipyards and thousands of smaller informal shipyards.
Only the bribing of Bangladeshi rail-ministers have to be handled.
The rise of Rotem as a global supplier of rolling stock has been rather meteoric and spectacular to watch, they not only supply all of Asia and Europe, but have set up manufacturing for Metro commuter trains in Philadelphia. LA Metro (subway) and commuter rail coaches (MetroLink) are increasing sourced from that factory in Philly. The fact that the Koreans have captured the highly regulated US train coach market says a lot about their product quality control and ambitions.
New Rotem Metrolink coaches in LA back in 2014. Many more have been added in batches since.
Rotem has JV factories in India, Iran and Turkey, just to name a few. We should negotiate with Rotem (and PT Inka) to set up our own rail-coach factory, at least assemble rail-coaches to our local specs.
Here is the story of a recent factory set up in Iran in 2017
Iran, South Korea in €720m Rail Deal
5th December 2017 in
Industry,
Security
Iran Rail Industries Development Company (IRICO) and South Korea’s
Hyundai Rotem have signed a contract to jointly manufacture diesel rail-cars for public transport in suburban Tehran.
The €720-million contract was signed during a ceremony in the Iranian capital, Tehran, attended by Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Akhoundi.
This is the IRICO commuter rail design
Hyundai Rotem will produce 150 cars in South Korea, with another 300 to be assembled in Iran by IRICO under a technology transfer agreement.
Delivery will take place over 6-and-a-half years.
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Rotem also set up a JV in Turkey named EuRotem sometime ago to manufacture high speed rail equipment.
Eurotem Railway Carriage Factory
Project Name: Eurotem Railway Carriage Factory
Location: Adapazari, Turkey
Completion Date: November 2007
Duration: 11 months
Client: Hyundai Eurotem AS
General Description: 9.800 sqm factory, 2.000 sqm office building
Even Myanmar is importing Semi-Knockdown kits from China (SiFang) and are assembling them in two different factories. We have a tradition of manufacturing these items locally for the last hundred years (way before Korea was a developed economy), and we are still importing. We should be ashamed...