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Rail engineering breakthrough from DCD Rolling Stock

28th October 2016

  

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DCD Group  (0.06 MB)

Having become the first rolling stock company in the southern hemisphere to pioneer its own fabricated lightweight, cost-competitive locomotive bogie, South Africa-based DCD Rolling Stock is now also extending its technology into wagon and passenger coach bogies aimed at the global market.

According to DCD Rolling Stock General Manager Gary Steinmetz, the company – part of the DCD Group – has moved away from the traditional casting-based bogie construction and designed its own fabricated bogies using hot rolled steel.

“The main advantage of our new bogie design for diesel electric locomotives is that, instead of having all the mass sitting in the bogie frame, there is now flexibility to distribute the mass within the locomotive body,” said Steinmetz.
He said that this made the locomotives particularly suitable for many markets in Africa where rail operators were restricted to lighter axle loads.

“The weight reduction in the fabricated design is mainly achieved through using exactly the right thickness of steel that is required to deliver the necessary strength,” he said. “When pouring a casting, on the other hand, this uniform and specific thickness is difficult to achieve; the result is usually an over-engineered, heavier product.” The extensive work that usually went into machining a bogie casting, he said, was now directed into cutting and welding – activity that DCD Rolling Stock, with its extensive plasma-cutting and CNC infrastructure, is well equipped to conduct. The company developed technology to eliminate the requirement for stress relieving and machining after the frame is fabricated. Based in Boksburg near Johannesburg, the company is South Africa’s leader in locomotive manufacture, and also has its own range of freight wagons and passenger coaches.

“For many decades we have fine-tuned our capacity in designing and constructing locomotives, wagons and tank wagons, as well as passenger cars out of mild steel and stainless steel,” he said. “With these fabricated bogie designs now part of our intellectual property, we can make a complete offering to customers without having to rely on third party designs which may raise the cost.”

While there was previously a trade-off in which customers’ operating savings would justify a premium price for fabricated bogies, Steinmetz highlighted that the efficiency of DCD’s build methods has now established a base price that is globally competitive. “No foreign-built bogie can beat our price,” he said. “Our fabricated bogie is now more cost-effective than imported products. In addition to this benefit, we are also contributing to job creation mainly through the extensive cutting and welding involved.”

He said the impact of the lighter bogie on the carrying capacity of wagons in a mining or industrial environment was substantial – allowing greater efficiencies when bulk commodities were transported over long distances. “With the limits to the axle loads that interface with the rail, it is vital to conserve as much weight allocation as possible for the load, rather than the bogies – which can take up as much as 40 t out of a weight limit of 180 t for a locomotive,” said Steinmetz. “Lighter components also mean that moving empty wagons then requires less energy consumption.”
In the passenger coach environment, it was the stop-start nature of the transport cycle that could be impacted by reduced weight, making for significant energy savings.

“This motion pattern – speeding up quickly when leaving a station and then braking hard before the next stop – is obviously very energy-intensive, requiring a considerable energy to get the train up to speed quickly between stations,” he said.

He added that in many countries, the level of energy consumption is aggravated by the heavy ‘Commonwealth’ bogies, which contribute about 40 t to the weight of each coach. Lightweight coaches fitted with the lighter, fabricated bogies would impact directly on the energy required – which has often been a rising cost in rail operations. “Despite the subdued market conditions in the rail sector, we expect considerable interest in our new offerings from around Africa and outside the continent,” said Steinmetz. “The inclusion of our own fabricated bogie design now gives us a ‘package’ that will be hard to beat on quality and price.”

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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