The Firm That Built the Trams Wanted 71 Percent More to Cool Them

Prague's Škoda 15T ForCity number 9239 is in the workshops of MPK-Łódź at Helenówek, where the Polish operator showed it off on arrival. It is the pilot car for retrofitting self-contained air conditioning by ENIKA, and its departure from DPP's central workshops was reported at the start of the month. What is new is the paperwork that has caught up with it: the awarder's written report on the tender is out, and it shows what the two losing bidders wanted.

Three prices for the same job

ENIKA, which won the contract in July after a competition lasting more than a year, bid 3.217 million crowns excluding VAT to air-condition one tram. Across the 123 cars covered by the framework agreement that is 395.685 million crowns excluding VAT — just under 36 million below the contract's estimated value.

The firm expected to win was Škoda Pars, of the Škoda Group that built the trams and holds all their documentation. Zdopravy.cz describes it as the favourite. Its bid was 5.489 million crowns excluding VAT a car. The third bidder, Bahoza ST of Kladno, which has fitted air conditioning for years, asked 3.401 million.

The two award criteria were total price, weighted 80 percent, and the length of the warranty on the air-conditioning unit, weighted 20 percent. All three firms offered an identical 60 months. That detail decides how the tender should be read: with the warranty criterion returning the same score to everyone, the 20 percent was inert and price settled the whole thing.

The gap is large enough to be worth the arithmetic. At Škoda Pars' rate the 123 cars would come to 675.1 million crowns excluding VAT against the 395.7 million DPP contracted — a difference of about 279 million, by our calculation from the figures in the report. Bahoza ST, 184,000 crowns a car above ENIKA, came within about 23 million across the programme.

What is actually being installed

Each 15T gets three units, one per section. They run automatically under their own control system in four modes: cooling, ventilation, ventilation with preheating of the intake air at low temperatures, and tempering the car. The design is deliberately an island — a separate system with its own control that does not reach into the vehicle's existing superior control system — but it has to cooperate with the trams' existing heating and allow partial or full recirculation of air in every mode. The units will use exclusively environmentally friendly refrigerant.

That specification is the plainest explanation of how a supplier without the manufacturer's drawings could underbid the manufacturer by this margin. A system that does not interface with the car's own control electronics needs less of the documentation that was Škoda Pars' advantage. ENIKA has done the same kind of work before, retrofitting air conditioning into Bombardier NGT6 trams for the operator in Kraków.

The pilot is the gate

The framework contract covers up to 123 cars — the entire first half of the 15T delivery, with two exceptions, numbers 9243 and 9285, which already have saloon air conditioning. Nothing else moves until 9239 comes home: the prototype faces homologation and trial operation in Prague, and only after the technology is successfully verified will DPP start sending further trams to Poland.

After that the conversion is meant to run at a rate of at least 20 trams a year, timed around the cars' maintenance intervals rather than against a delivery schedule. At that pace 123 cars is a programme of six years or more — again our arithmetic, not a date from the report. It is a long sentence for a comfort upgrade, and it explains why the tender was fought over for more than a year before anyone drove a tram to Łódź.