Yesterday, there was an open house/tour at the Jerusalem Light Rail depot, near French Hill/Givat HaShapira and the Mount Scopus Hebrew U campus for those of you who know Jerusalem. The event was part of "Batim M'Bifnim", which literally translates to houses from within, taking place yesterday and today with tours of various buildings throughout Jerusalem, I think there were about 80 different events in total. The tour was as follows. First, we had a short presentation on the light rail given by representatives from CityPass, the consortium building the light rail, followed by a Q&A. The most frequently asked question was when will the light rail open. The answer is that they hope to have all major construction by next Rosh Hashanah, at which point they will test the vehicles and infrastructure for several months, with a target date of opening the line in March or April 2011. Personally, I think that timeline is very optimistic considering how much track still needs to be laid. After the Q&A, we were led out to two LRVs that were on display. A representative from Alstom talked about various features of the cars, which are Alstom Citadis 302s, identical to what operate in Barcelona and other European cities. The Jerusalem cars have secure undercarriages to prevent tampering for malicious purposes, windows that won't shatter if stones are thrown at them, other reinforcements in the event of other "incidents" (that was the word used by the Alstom representative), and also more normal features such as automated announcements, LED displays, and surveillance cameras.
Anyway, enough of trying to recap the presentations, but if anyone has further questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer. Here are photos of the depot facility itself and of the vehicles:
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