Canadian transportation and aviation major Bombardier Inc on Wednesday inaugurated a new railway vehicle-making facility at Savli, Vadodara in Gujarat, the first fully foreign-owned railway coach manufacturing plant in India.

Bombardier Transportation India (BTI), a subsidiary of Bombardier Inc, will start assembling coach shells and bogies for `Movia' metro cars for the Delhi metro, in the new factory.

Bombardier, the world's second-largest trainmaker by sales, plans to sell `Movia' coaches, to be assembled at the Vadodara factory, at Rs2,360 crore (425 million Euros or $590 million) each.

Delivery of coaches is expected to start by early 2010, well before the start of the Commonwealth Games scheduled for October that year in New Delhi.

The company plans the unit, which will initially manufacture 340 Movia metro cars for the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), to become a low-cost centre for its global projects.

Bombardier is already operating a facility to manufacture converters, electronic controls for trains, communications for three-phase propulsion technology, as well as circuit breakers and tap-changers at Vadodara.

The US major also has a software development centre for signalling and traction applications at Vadodara, which also caters to the Bombardier's software requirements.

Bombardier, which has manufacturing facilities in China as well, last week won a $377 million order to supply Movia rail cars to Singapore. It has also orders for more than 3,300 Movia cars from cities such as London and Shanghai.

Asian countries, including India, Singapore, Thailand, are building more specialised railway networks to ease urban traffic and Bombardier expects to corner a major share of the new business.