Pittsburgh-based Wabtec Corporation, a recently merged entity between GE Transportation and Faiveley Transport, which manufactures locomotives, freight cars and passenger transit vehicles for governments and enterprises across 50 geographies, has opened its largest ever engineering and digital electronics design and development centre in Bengaluru.
The centre, set up at an investment of over $5 million, will host engineering teams spanning across the company’s digital electronics portfolio. The centre comes with validation labs for distributed power, positive train control, trip optimiser electronic air brake, signalling systems and advanced train automation solutions. Wabtec Corporation’s global technology officer and senior V-P, Engineering, Dominique Malenfant, said, “Our technology team in India will be crucial to bring breakthrough technologies to the industries we serve. Our new design and development centre will facilitate collaboration between our development hubs across the U.S. and Europe to further our innovation.” Wabtec has over 27,000 employees, of whom over 5,000 are technologists. The company employs over 3,000 people in India. The new centre has over 600 engineers and the strength will be scaled up to over 1,000 in a year.
The company has a mandate to deliver 1,000 diesel-electric locomotives to the Indian Railways (IR) by 2025. It may be recalled that General Electric had earlier signed a $2.6 billion contract with IR to deliver these locomotives.
