You're reading: Ukraine’s alternative to Hyundai

Ukraine could make high-speed trains for one-third less than the ones it purchesed from South Korea's Hyundai for Euro 2012.

KREMENCHUK, Poltava Oblast – There has hardly been a week in the past month when Ukraine’s new high-speed trains were not in the news – and often it was bad news.

Breakdowns and delays have dogged the South Korean-made Hyundais since their launch on May 27. The nation paid $300 million for 10 trains, four of them already delivered and in use.

But maybe the government did not need to look so far or pay so much to replace its dilapidated Soviet-designed fleet.

In 2010, when the Cabinet was shopping around for trains, Volodymyr Prykhodko, president of Kryukiv Rail Car, Ukraine’s leading freight car producer and monopoly manufacturer of passenger railcars, made a bid with high-speed electric trains his engineers had just developed.

Costing one-third less than those made by Hyundai, Prykhodko claims the trains boast a more superior set of features. Inspired by the French TGV, they can travel at the speed up to 220 kilometers per hour, which is 60 kilometers faster than the Hyundai trains.

“At that time [Prime Minister Mykola] Azarov didn’t believe that we will make trains in time for the Euro,” says Prykhodko. “We had no experience of producing trains like that. But the Koreans were also inexperienced – in working with our railroads and local standards.”

Dmytro Yagello, an analyst at Kyiv’s Center for Transport Strategy, says the government did not believe the Ukrainian trains can be ready, tested and fully certified by the tangled Ukrainian bureaucracy in time for the football championship.

The original aim of the authorities was to introduce speed trains by the start of Euro 2012 football championship, but the plan turned out to be too ambitious.

Nor did it help that Korea’s Eximbank was ready to issue a loan to Ukraine, conditional on buying trains made by their own Hyundai. So the government used the offer and commissioned 10 trains from Hyundai, while Prykhodko got a contract for two backups at the price of Hr 200 million, or $25 million, each.

But when the Kyiv Post visited the plant last month, he said the money was yet to be paid. “Hyundai got an advance payment and government guarantees [that the rest will be fully paid]. Our plant hasn’t got anything, not a single hryvnia,” complains Prykhodko.

Nevertheless, one of the trains is out of the factory and has recently been tested at the route between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk.

Maxym Bespalov, a journalist from Dnipropetrovsk, traveled on it on June 23 – just days after he traveled on the Korean competitor. He was impressed with the Ukrainian train’s comfortable seats, its spacious luggage compartment and handy placement of sockets. All of these features were superior to Hyundai, he says.

But Prykhodko says the real advantage is in the engineering. His train boasts a shape that improves its aerodynamics, and a modern crash system that compensates for bumps and prevents cars from coming over one another.

It has a smaller number of driving bogies which means it’s less likely to break down and axle-box temperature control, which prevents it from overheating and crashing, a feature that Hyundai trains don’t have, claims Prykhodko.

Prykhodko says he is ready to sell those trains abroad, but says it would help if his own government didn’t snub his product.

At the moment, the factory produces passenger cars for Kazakhstan, but no speed trains.

“The Kryukiv plant is obviously not a favorite of either [state-owned railway] Ukrzaliznytsia, or the government, despite the fact that Sergiy Tigipko, [now deputy prime minister], is co-owner of the plant,” said Yagello, of Kyiv’s Center for Transport Strategy.

A week after he made the comment, Tigipko’s company TEKO-Dniprometis sold most of its share of Kryukiv plant, leaving just 10 out of 23 per cent of shares it owned.  Kommersant newspaper reported that Tigipko sold his shares because the plant has not received any revenue from the new high-speed trains it has developed, despite spending some Hr 200 million on it.

In the meantime, the Hyundai trains are not living up to expectations, breaking down and causing delays of the whole train network. They’re getting so much criticism that Borys Kolesnikov, deputy prime minister in charge of Euro 2012 preparations, last week accused Ukrainian journalists of waging a war against the new speed trains.

When the Kyiv Post called Kolesnikov to ask whether the Kryukiv trains are considered an option for Ukrainian railways in future, he refused to comment.

Prykhodko says the first year will show how important it is for the train makers to have the empirical knowledge of the railway:  “In Ukraine what’s on paper is not always what’s in reality. That’s the problem for foreign train makers.”  Analyst Yagello is less gloomy. He says the troubles experienced by the Hyundai trains are due to a lack of testing. The trains arrived to Ukraine just two months before they were supposed to fully operate.

An optimistic Prykhodko said the technology used to develop his trains will be recycled next year to produce aerodynamic buses.

Expensive 20 minutes

Trains like Hyundai or Kryukiv Rail Car’s new brainchild are highly valued for being two-system, which means that they can switch between two power grids and save the travelers about 20 minutes per journey on some routes.

In Ukraine, many of the routes are designed in a way that needs that switch, such as Kyiv-Kharkiv and Kyiv-Donetsk.

Those 20 minutes are what distinguish expensive two-system trains and older fast trains, also produced by Kryukivsky plant, that can go up to 160 km/h, the exact speed of Hyundai and the maximum that Ukrainian railroads allow.

For comparison, France’s TGV, one of the fastest in Europe, travels at the speed of about 270 kilometers per hour.

“I believe Ukraine must think well on that. Do we really want those extra 20 minutes of six hours trip so badly we can pay so much? Or shall we sacrifice them to have much, much cheaper tickets?” Volodymyr Prykhodko, president of Kryukiv Rail Car in Kremenchuk of Poltava Oblast says..

Nevertheless, the new speed trains were supposed to make a vast improvement on the old railway in Ukraine, where regular sleepers travel with an average speed of 60 to 100 kilometers per hour. Prykhodko also says that apart from speed, the new speed trains brought inevitable improvements to the railway, which could not sustain them otherwise.

“The Korean contract brought huge upgrades to local railroads, the improvements that will stay and work for us,” he says.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]