Talgo

Talgo is a Spanish manufacturer of intercity, standard, and high speed passenger trains.

Corporate history

TALGO (Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol, Goicoechea-Oriol light articulated train), Alejandro Goicoechea and José Luis Oriol being the founders of the company.

Talgo Patents S.A. was first incorporated in 1942.

In March 2007 Talgo sold its Finnish rolling stock manufacturing subsidiary Talgo Oy to its local management and other Finnish investors. The company, which Talgo had owned for only seven years, reverted to its previous name of Transtech Oy. The company spends 10 to 12 percent of revenues on research and development, but the main revenue source is the Spanish railway operator Renfe.

Talgo made an initial public offering on the Bolsa de Madrid in May 2015. The IPO valued the company at €1.27 billion.

In July 2015, Talgo stated its intention to ship a train to India at its own cost as a demonstration on the Mumbai-Delhi rail route.

Design

Talgo trains are best known for their unconventional articulated railway passenger car that uses a type similar to the Jacobs bogie that Talgo patented in 1941. The wheels are mounted in pairs but not joined by an axle and the bogies are shared between coaches rather than underneath individual coaches. This allows a railway car to take a turn at higher speed with less swaying. As the coaches are not mounted directly onto wheel bogies, the coaches are more easily insulated from track noise. Talgo trains fitted with variable gauge axles can change rail gauge - for instance at the 1,668 mm Iberian gauge/1,435 mm standard gauge at the Spanish-French border interchange.