The MBTA’s new Orange Line cars are rolling on the tracks — in China. Six of the new cars navigated a test track at the Changchun, China facility of rail giant CRRC. As first reported by WGBH News last week, they’ll be shipped to the company’s facility in Springfield, where the balance of the order of 152 Orange Line and 252 Red Line cars will be built.
The MBTA's new Orange Line train cars on a line in Changchun, China.
The new cars include LCD passenger information displays, CCTV cameras, platform gap mitigation and automatic passenger counting among other high-tech features, according to a CRRC fact sheet.
Over the past the past five months, 23 employees from the Springfield facility traveled to Changchun to study the car-building process. The Springfield plant is a former Westinghouse building on which renovation began in March. Train manufacturing will begin there next spring, with the first cars scheduled for delivery to the T in December 2018.
