Honolulu’s first rail cars for its public transit system have left the factory and are Hawaii-bound, giving local leaders who’ve labored to keep the project moving ahead something to smile about.

A photograph posted earlier this week to Ansaldo Honolulu’s website showed the first rail car encased in shrink-wrap and leaving its Pittsburg, Calif., assembly factory. That car, along with three others, will link together to form Oahu’s first driverless train for the island’s elevated rail system. They’re now en route to San Diego where they’ll be loaded onto a Pasha cargo ship. They’re then slated to arrive on the island by the end of the month.

The city awarded Ansaldo the largest contract in state history, at $1.4 billion, to design, build and operate the rail transit cars and signaling system.

“This is a big deal for us, to have our first train cars arriving here,” Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation spokesman Bill Brennan said Friday. “It’s a milestone for us, to get those in here.”

Rail advocates say the transit system will give west-side commuters a much-needed alternative to fighting through freeway traffic into town. Construction has proven much costlier than officials predicted, however, with the price tag rising from $5.26 billion to an estimated $6.56 billion and final completion pushed back nearly two years.

The rail cars should arrive about two months after the Honolulu City Council and Mayor Kirk Caldwell gave final approval to Bill 23, which extends Oahu’s 0.5 percent general excise tax surcharge funding the project another five years to cover rail’s growing construction costs. Those approvals came after Caldwell and other rail officials spent a year lobbying to secure the additional funds, with the transit project facing a projected shortfall of about $1.3 billion.

Despite the financial woes, HART has regularly touted construction progress, such as when workers complete a new mile of guideway. Last fall, as the Council prepared to take up Bill 23, HART and Caldwell held a tour of the nearly finished building housing the rail operations center adjacent to Leeward Community College.

For the past two years, the city has also displayed at Kapolei Hale a mock-up model of the system’s rail car so the public could get a better sense of what they’ll look like.

Having the actual rail cars on-island will be another positive step for the project, HART Executive Director Dan Grabauskas said. In the coming years, 19 more four-car trains are slated to arrive on Oahu.

Once the first cars arrive, they’ll undergo what’s called “static” testing at the rail operations center to ensure all their components work properly, Grabauskas said. Then, later this fall, when the second train is set to arrive, the two trains will undergo “dynamic” testing, in which crews will test performance on the automated train track in the operation center’s rail yard, Grabauskas said.