Expansion of Express Service OOD locomotive repair capacity through delivery and installation of underfloor wheel lathe.

As locomotives are running, their wheels' geometry changes because of friction to the rails. For safety reasons and to avoid derailment it is necessary to keep the geometry of locomotive wheelsets within legally set margins. Profile correction of the wheelsets is done by wheelset lathes. There are two types of wheelset lathes - installed on the floor (portal) and installed under floor - under rail level - in a special pit (underfloor). With a portal lathe it is only possible to machine wheelsets that are dismantled from the locomotive while with an underfloor wheel lathe the serviced locomotive passes above it, without the need of wheelset dismantling. At the moment, at our wheelset department, we correct wheelset profiles with a portal lathe. This technology requires always to dismantle the wheelsets from the serviced locomotives and just after that to machine them. Dismantling and assembly of the wheelsets to the locomotive require long technological time and are labor- and energy intensive. This interrupts our manufacturing process and limits our repair capacity. Through installation of an underfloor wheel lathe we will reduce the time for a locomotive profile correction by many times, we will reduce electricity, water, and natural gas consumption. In the meantime, we will optimize our manufacturing process, will increase our wheelset department's capacity and will increase labor productivity. With the underfloor wheel lathe installation, we will do the following actions: improve our company's locomotive repair processes, improve resources effectiveness and locomotive repair efficiency, and improve our existing service of locomotive wheelsets profile correction.

Comments