Inekon Trams

[3] In the early 1990s Inekon Group tried to gain control of ČKD, which was one of the largest engineering companies in the country at the time, and which had produced almost 20,000 trams, including 14,000 Tatra T3.

While the effort to acquire the company failed, some of ČKD's employees were dissatisfied with the new owners and decided to come over to Inekon.

[4] From 1996[5] until 2001/2, parent company Inekon Group had participated in a joint venture with Škoda Transportation Systems, known as Škoda-Inekon, for the construction of trams.

One transport operator, the Portland Streetcar, has a fleet that includes seven Škoda-Inekon 10T cars (built in 2001–2), three Inekon 12-Trio cars and one newer 10T built by United Streetcar under licence from Škoda, and all eleven have identical overall dimensions, configuration, and other technical specifications, and use mostly the same parts.

The Czech company partnered with Seattle-based Pacifica Marine, a transport vehicles refurbisher, in order to meet the requirement of 60% of U.S. content, which is needed for the project to be eligible for Federal funding.

While the manufacturing of the major parts would still take place in the Czech Republic, assembly, painting and testing was to be carried by the American company for this order.

Nevertheless, Inekon maintains capacities for production of trams as well as for their development, aiming to sell them especially in the American, Russian and Chinese tramway markets.

Trams of this type have been purchased by three U.S. cities,[1] as follows: All nine of the standard 12-Trio cars manufactured to date (in 2006–07) were equipped with propulsion control systems made by Elin EBG.