While the share is higher in Europe, only about 1% of railroad lines in the United States are equipped with overhead wires that carry electricity to power trains.
That presents a complicated challenge for engineers at Salt Lake City’s Stadler train manufacturing facility as they try to design cleaner vehicles for North American passenger rail lines.
The goal is to develop an electric battery-powered train, with suitable charging stations, that can work on this side of the Atlantic.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) A worker sits at a desk at the Stadler manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, April 9, 2025.
Stadler US CEO Martin Ritter said unlike Utah’s TRAX system, which relies on overhead catenary wires, many U.S. passenger rail lines run on tracks owned by freight companies, where wiring is impossible. That creates an engineering enigma: How can Stadler build cleaner trains without cabling?
“If we still want to have an electric train,” Ritter said, “we could do that with a battery train.”
The Swiss company’s west-side facility is in the throes of building electric subway trains for Atlanta’s MARTA system and double-decker vehicles powered by overhead wires for Northern California’s Caltrain route. Most of its orders on the books for coming years are for “alternative propulsion” trains, or vehicles that don’t use fossil fuels to move.
To fill those orders more quickly and efficiently, Stadler is doubling the size of its factory just south of Interstate 80 near Salt Lake City’s western edge and adding facilities that will allow it to build trains from scratch stateside.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Train car bodies made in Europe sit at the Stadler manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. They will be assembled at the factory.
A major part of its expansion is developing a train battery-charging station next to its on-site kilometer-long test track.
Stadler is working on two separate electric battery-powered train projects, a collaboration with Utah State University on a single demonstration train and an order for eight trains from Metra, the Chicago-area commuter rail system. The west-side facility is due to start building the Metra trains late this year.
While there are some electric battery-powered trains in operation in Europe, the Metra vehicles would be the first of their kind in North America.
Ritter said building a charging station on-site is key to testing trains’ capabilities and demonstrating their prowess to potential purchasers. Realistically, though, individual transit agencies won’t exactly know the range of the new trains and their charging needs until they start using them on routes in their region. Factors like weather, route slope and ridership can determine how long a train, like an electric car, could go on any given day.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) A train destined for Atlanta's MARTA subway system waits on the test track at the Stadler manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, April 9, 2025.
“The kind of charging stations the end customer will be using will determine how fast it charges,” Stadler US spokesperson Charlotte Thalhammer said, “how much it needs to recharge, all those kinds of things are going to be very individual.”
Ritter said the company is working to develop ideas for a charging system that could work for passenger trains that run on freight company-owned lines, but not impede those freight locomotives. He also said the company is interested in building battery-powered trains for companies such as Union Pacific in future.
The battery-charging station is only one part of the expansion that will double the manufacturing space of the Stadler plant, located at 5880 W 150 South.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Construction continues on the new sandblasting both at the Stadler manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, April 9, 2025.
The company is adding a welding facility and a sandblasting booth that will allow it to make its railcar bodies in Utah instead of having them shipped from its factories in Europe. Stadler is also building another assembly hall and expanding its displacement hall, where it transfers cars from one stage in the manufacturing process to another.
Stadler officials hope the expansion can help the company build more trains more efficiently as it fills orders for a handful of American transit systems, including TRAX, in the coming years.
“There’s been an extremely large amount of collaboration, with architects, engineers and the construction team, to potentially put together their perfect building,” said One West Construction project manager Spencer Johnson, who is managing the expansion, “modeled after facilities that are already in production and working in Europe.”
The Utah Inland Port Authority awarded a tax incentive to the train manufacturer for the expansion. The public authority will return to Stadler 10% of the company’s property tax annually for up to 25 years once the addition is complete.
Company officials plan to hire an additional 300 employees at the plant over the next three years.
