Państwowa Fabryka Wagonów
Państwowa Fabryka Wagonów (German literally: State Wagon Factory ), or Pafawag for short , is a Polish manufacturer of rail vehicles in Wrocław . The company was taken over by Adtranz in 1997 and is now part of Bombardier Transportation .
history
After the Second World War, Pafawag emerged from Linke-Hofmann-Busch's (LHB) plant in Breslau , which was nationalized in 1945. At the Breslau location, a predecessor company of LHB manufactured the first freight cars for the Upper Silesian Railway in 1839 . The LHB-Werke in Breslau were the largest rail vehicle manufacturer in Europe in the early twentieth century, with 7,000 workers producing vehicles on a 100 hectare factory site.
After the Second World War, over 80% of the plant was destroyed. However, the rapid reconstruction allowed the delivery of 100 freight cars as early as 1946. The plant employed around 6,000 people until the 1980s and mainly supplied cars and locomotives for the Polish state railway PKP . After the introduction of the free market economy, the PKP got into financial difficulties, so that orders failed to materialize and Pafawag was also drawn into the crisis.
ABB Daimler Benz Transportation took over Pafawag from the Polish state in 1997 on condition that fifty locomotives were ordered for PKP. The order comprised 42 locomotives of the EU11 series for 3 kV direct current and eight dual-system locomotives of the EU43 series for cross-border traffic. However, since PKP was unable to finance this order, the locomotives were later delivered to Trenitalia as E405 and RTC as E412 .
Until the takeover of Adtranz by Bombardier Transportation in 2001, the plant was known as Adtranz Pafawag , then as Bombardier Transportation Polska .
Web links
- Factory railway: Linke-Hofmann-Werke LHW, Breslau
Individual proof
- ↑ Wolna Droga: Jubileusz symbolu (Polish)