European Railroad Discussion > Finland: Transtech sold to Skoda

Date: 08/18/15 00:26
Finland: Transtech sold to Skoda
Author: McKey

A medium size Finnish rolling stock manufacturer Transtech has been sold to Skoda after lengthy negotiations. Government owned Transtech initially was set up in 1985 as the mines output declined it Northern Finland. The Idea was to provide work for the miners and the main markets were seen in the poorly developed eastern neighbor Soviet Union. It was presumed that Soviets would need huge number of autotransporters, but as so often happens, assumptions and markets did not meet. Still, even today you can find some Transtech built covered autocarriers in the Eastern traffic of 1520 mm network. Transtech also created and buillt highly popular IC2 double decker series for VR-Yhtymä (Finnish government owned railway monopoly), manufacturing of which has lasted until now, several variants been created during these years. Other manufacturing has been little bits of this and that, including LOK2000 license builds and class Dr16 heavy diesel locomotives in the 1990s. The latter is the latest for VR and has also been the first to be already retired for large part of the small fleet. Transtech also has tried to sell Artic trams, one of which was shown at Innotrans 2014. Yet, the strategy that they make something that always work does not seem to work with markets that often just want something cheap to get by the transportation needs.

Transtech was after intial steps sold to Talgo, and then sold back to Finland becoming part of the many family enterprises. Now, it is likely that Skoda will both bring even more and wider rail technology knowledge to Transtech, much marketing experience, and know how how to manufacture railroad rolling stock cheaper than is done today. Or, it may be that Skoda just wishes to have the market in the North, and will run Transtech down for most of its functions. Future will show. Today Transtech employs 530 people (some still ex. miners) and has a turnover of 95 million euros per year.

First set of pictures is of some of the IC2 coaches built by Transtech. VR still has orders for around 50 more coaches, to be completed by 2017.