Siemens Mobility Rail Manufacturing Campus, Lexington, North Carolina

Siemens Mobility’s rail manufacturing campus in Lexington, North Carolina, is where a new run of Amtrak passenger coaches gets built. On Oct. 14, 2026, the 200-acre Davidson County site collected three honors in ENR’s Texas & Southeast Best Projects: Best Project in Manufacturing, an Award of Merit for sustainability and a slot as a Project of the Year finalist.

Graycor was general contractor and HDR led design and engineering. The construction job came in at $185 million, on budget, and wrapped on schedule in November 2025 after 32 months. Siemens puts its total investment at $220 million.

Project Scope

The campus has 10 primary buildings totaling about 500,000 square feet, split among heavy manufacturing, warehousing and Class A offices. It’s a rail yard as much as a factory. Crews laid roughly 12,000 linear feet of track, including a new rail bridge tying into the Norfolk Southern line, along with railcar maintenance pits and four heavy-duty cranes.

The site didn’t cooperate. There’s about 100 feet of elevation change across the property, and earthwork ran to roughly 1.4 million cubic yards. Saturated soils, heavy rain and two hurricanes forced the team to resequence work. Utility design was still evolving during construction, so parts of the network, including force mains and natural gas, were reassessed and redesigned in the field. The rail bridge sits close enough to the nearby airport that FAA height limits ruled out a conventional pick, and it went in with a tandem lift using two cranes.

The office space is LEED certified, and Siemens-owned meters track energy use by building and by manufacturing segment. Lithko Contracting, Paulson-Cheek Mechanical, Recore Electrical Contractors and Precision Walls were among the trade partners.

Siemens broke ground on Aug. 23, 2023, and formally opened the plant in early April 2026.

Why It Matters

Until now, Siemens built its U.S. passenger rail cars in Sacramento. Lexington gives it an East Coast production base. The plant is already turning out Venture coaches, with the first locally built units for Amtrak’s Airo fleet due in summer 2026. It also handles coach and locomotive overhauls and bogie maintenance, and Siemens says it could take on light rail vehicles later.

Siemens had hired more than 375 people by April and expects to pass 500 jobs by 2028, backed by a state Job Development Investment Grant.

Contractors will look at the delivery record. A greenfield rail campus with a hundred feet of grade change, a utility redesign in progress and two hurricanes still finished on budget and on time. That’s rare on heavy industrial work.

Project Team & Details