The First of 123 Trams Leaves for Łódź to Have Air Conditioning Fitted

Škoda 15T number 9239 was loaded onto a transporter at DPP's central workshops on Thursday and sent to Łódź. It is the pilot vehicle for the retrofitting of air conditioning into the first series of Prague's 15T trams — the single largest comfort upgrade the fleet has had since the cars entered service, and one the city argued about for years before it was contracted.

The work goes to ENIKA, a Polish company that won the tender in July after a competition lasting more than a year, and will be done in the halls of MPK Łódź, the Polish city's transport operator.

What it costs and how far it goes

ENIKA's winning bid was 3.217 million crowns excluding VAT for one tram. Across the 123 cars covered by the framework contract that comes to 395.685 million crowns excluding VAT, which DPP says is just under 36 million below the estimated value of the contract. Three bidders competed.

The 123 cars are the whole first half of the 15T delivery, with two exceptions — numbers 9243 and 9285, which already have saloon air conditioning. Once the programme is running properly the pace is to be at least twenty trams a year, scheduled around each vehicle's maintenance intervals. ENIKA says that in full flow a tram will travel from Prague to Łódź roughly every fortnight, with a completed car coming back the other way.

Three units, four modes, five years of warranty

Each tram gets three separate air-conditioning units, one per articulated section. Each has 17 kW of cooling and can also heat at 6 kW. Operation is automatic, run by the units' own control system in four working modes: cooling, ventilation, ventilation with preheating of the intake air at low temperatures, and tempering the vehicle. The units use an environmentally friendly refrigerant exclusively, and carry a sixty-month warranty.

ENIKA has done this before. The company retrofitted air conditioning into Bombardier NGT6 trams for the transport operator in Kraków.

The pilot is a gate, not a formality

Nothing else leaves Prague until 9239 comes back. The prototype faces homologation and trial operation on its return, and only after the technology has been successfully verified will DPP start sending further trams to Poland. That sequencing is the reason this is a story about a single tram rather than about a contract signed in July: until the first conversion is type-approved, the 395-million programme exists on paper.

It is also the right way round. Three units cutting into the roof of an articulated tram is a structural and electrical intervention on a vehicle that has fifteen years of service behind it and more ahead. Discovering a problem on car one is cheap. Discovering it on car thirty, after six months of fortnightly shuttles to Łódź, is not.

Why air conditioning became the argument it did

The 15T is Prague's standard modern tram and the first series arrived without saloon cooling, which is now the comfort feature passengers notice before any other. That omission is what makes this retrofit worth 396 million crowns rather than being left to the next generation of vehicles: the cars concerned have most of their working lives still to run, and the alternative to converting them is passengers riding un-air-conditioned trams into the 2040s.

The same question sits underneath the dispute now running between DPP and ROPID over whether to rebuild more T3R.PLF cars, where the organiser's stated preference is new trams or reconstructions that add full-vehicle air conditioning. Read together, the two files are one argument about how much of Prague's existing fleet is worth upgrading rather than replacing — and this is the half of it that has a signed price.