The trains are being made by China’s CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, one of the world’s biggest rail manufacturers, in the Chinese province of Jilin. They are then shipped to the Newport rail yards of engineering firm Downer and assembled. A letter from Downer to unions in April says that, in order to maximise the efficient assembly of the trains, "certain work tasks will now be completed by CRRC prior to the train sets being shipped to Melbourne for completion". This work included electrical wiring, and represented many hundreds of hours of technical assembly. But the government maintains that there are 210 local workers assembling the new trains at Newport – more than originally promised. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In an email to staff in August, Metro Trains’ general manager of train services Ali Elbouch told railway workers that the faults in the new carriages were proving challenging to fix.

"Testing at Pakenham East is finding faults which, although normal for a first-of-type train, is taking longer than expected to rectify," he wrote. "Safety is our number one priority and it is essential that we make sure the train passes certain tests." Six of the new trains are now being tested at Pakenham East, but there is no date for when they will leave the test track – deliberately separated from the city’s public transport network – and be put through 10,000 kilometres of running on the Metro Trains network. They must complete this many kilometres in testing before they are considered safe for passengers. Asked when the first train would begin testing on the Metro network, a spokeswoman for Transport Infrastructure Minister Jacinta Allan said "by the end of the year". Carriages manufactured in the Chinese province of Jilin sit in Newport on Friday awaiting assembly. Credit:Eddie Jim Ms Allan’s spokeswoman confirmed the trains were a year late. The government did not detail what was wrong with the trains. In August, Ms Allan was questioned by Nine News on what was wrong with them. "It’s simply taken longer than had first been planned," she said.

"This is a large and complex project and it’s important each train undergoes thorough testing, before entering service to ensure they are working properly and meet safety requirement," her spokeswoman said on Friday. Rail Tram and Bus Union state secretary Luba Grigorovitch said the consortium that had won the government contract did so on the basis that specific works would be done here. Carriages next to North Williamstown railway station, photographed in June this year. Credit:Joe Armao Instead, the state government was allowing the rail consortium to "prioritise meeting deadlines at the expense of local jobs," she said. Ms Grigorovitch said this "offshoring of manufacturing jobs" for the new Chinese-made trains was happening while leaving rail workers at Alstom in Ballarat "in limbo".

Alstom is a French multinational train manufacturer that has made the X'Trapolis trains now in service on Melbourne’s network. It has an assembly centre in Ballarat that is at risk of closure. Loading Public Transport Users Association spokesman Daniel Bowen said it was disappointing the introduction of the trains had been delayed, because the Cranbourne and Pakenham lines "suffer from some of the worst crowding on the rail network, and the extra capacity is sorely needed". "Passengers are used to late trains, but a one-year delay is not what anybody expected," he said. Opposition transport infrastructure spokesman David Davis said that "very serious questions" were emerging about the quality of the carriages being built in China, and about whether they contained the promised local content.

The new trains are a dedicated fleet to run initially on the Cranbourne and Pakenham train lines, and will run through to Sunbury when the new Metro Tunnel rail project opens in 2025. They are capable of carrying 1100 passengers across a seven-car set – 20 per cent more people than the largest train now on the network.