History was made early yesterday morning as, for the first time since 2008, a British-made piece of rolling stock entered passenger service abroad, with the Cairo Monorail in Egypt welcoming new trains from Derby-based manufacturer Alstom.

The contract to build and operate the new system is worth £2.3 billion, with the contract to build the new rolling stock awarded via a competitive international tender to Alstom UK, backed by UK Export Finance.

The schedule for delivering the trains was tight, with the first train leaving Alstom’s Litchurch Lane on 14th June 2021, just 20 months after the original contract was signed, and the last of the 68 trains leaving on 16th January 2024.

Cairo’s new monorail system is the first of its kind in Africa, and in its first phase, it will run for 26 miles above street level on precast beams, helping lower carbon emissions across Cairo, home to over 20 million people. The driverless system is designed to carry up to 45,000 passengers per hour and is built on Alstom’s existing Innovia Monorail platform, which is also seen in large cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Las Vegas.

Alstom has worked in collaboration with UK Export Finance to improve its capacity to build new monorail rolling stock, which is now being used to develop rolling stock for projects across the ever-growing regions of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where the demand for cost-effective, high-capacity rapid transit is ever increasing with the populations of these areas on the rise.

“Alstom has proved again that UK rail can be an export powerhouse. Litchurch Lane is a unique end to end rolling stock Centre of Excellence. The Cairo programme shows this site can compete and win anywhere. With UK Export Finance, we are pursuing opportunities across the Middle East, Africa and Asia to support the UK Government’s plans to maximise trade opportunities now and in the future,”

Andrew DeLeone, Chief Executive Officer Alstom Europe