Cincinnati taps CAF USA for streetcar order

Cincinnati has selected CAF USA to provide five streetcars for the city's streetcar line, under construction since a Feb. 17 groundbreaking ceremony.

Mayor Mark Mallory made the announcement Tuesday night during his State of the City address. Mallory has been a consistent and staunch supporter of the project, which has been targeted by local anti-rail partisans and spurned by Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

The Cincinnati Streetcar website Wednesday noted, “The City will now enter into contract negotiations with CAF USA, the next step toward a formal contract award and Notice to Proceed.”

CAF was chosen over several other competitors responding to an earlier Request for Proposals; among the other vendors was Clackamas, Ore.-based United Streetcar, LLC, which won a “do-over” earlier this week for a two-car order by Washington, D.C.

An industry source told Railway Age early Wednesday that once a contract was signed, CAF USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Besain, Spain-based Constucciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, would assemble the streetcars at its facility in Elmira, N.Y. Later on Wednesday, while issuing a press release affirming CAF USA’s selection, the city offered some details for streetcar design, including motive power, explaining some of the reasoning behind its choice of vendor.

The city’s press release said, in part, “The vehicle offered by CAF USA is a conventionally-powered vehicle with a 100% low-floor design. While the City’s RFP process included the ability for vendors to propose conventionally powered ‘on-wire’ vehicles as well as ‘off-wire’ technology, the ‘off-wire’ technology was higher priced and determined to have limited applicability, given the topography of Cincinnati’s first streetcar route.”

Phase I of the Cincinnati Streetcar will run on a 4.9-mile loop covering 18 stops, linking the city’s largest employment centers, Downtown and Uptown, and the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.