[av_heading heading=’How Rail Wheel Factory has kept the machinery rolling, save nation billions of dollars’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’1′ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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03 July 2017
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With over 12,000 locomotives of both electric and diesel types, 50,000 coaches and 2 lakh wagons, plenty of wheel-sets are needed to keep them rolling on Indian Railways’ 65,000-km network of steel rails. Tata Steel (earlier called Tisco) and Durgapur Steel Plant can meet less than half of Indian Railways’ needs for new rolling stock and replacements for worn out wheel-sets. As early as in 1960s, it was realised that indigenous manufacturing capacity had to be built to save precious foreign exchange.
At that time, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and a host of other cyber warriors, which today earn the nation millions of dollars, were not even a blip on the horizon. After much deliberation, the Planning Commission sanctioned Rs 146 crore in 1978 setting the ball rolling to build the first-ever wheel and axle plant in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), which was inaugurated by Indira Gandhi in 1984.
A bold decision to go in for cast steel wheels as against the prevalent standard for forged ones were taken to benefit from the very high productivity it offered. In a far-sighted move, a state-of-the-art technology from the best in the field—Griffin Wheel Company of the US—was selected. This technology for cast steel wheels conformed to the Association of American Railroads’ specification M208, while the axles were to be made to AAR specification M101.
The Rail Wheel Factory (RWF) in Bangalore forged its millionth axle by March 2008, and tapped its 75,000th heat by May 2009. It reached a peak annual output of 2 lakh cast wheels, 1 lakh machined axles, 70,000 wheel-sets, 75,250 forged axles, while 1,00,000th heat was tapped from its three giant arc furnaces exactly five years later in March 2013.
By 2010, it had set up in-house capability to generate oxygen for process requirements and managed to save the nation billions of dollars in foreign exchange over three decades. A long forging line of two Austrian-built GFM machines and associated furnaces to heat the billets and then normalise them post-forging, three axle machining lines with scores of CNC (Computerised Numeric Control) profile copying machining lathes, a giant 300-tonne hydraulic press to force fit cast wheels onto forged axles, and three giant arc furnaces which guzzle up to 12MW of electric energy each make up the major hardware at the facility, spread over 2,000 acres.
An 8MW diesel generator provides standby power for essential services. Mercifully, the current scenario in Karnataka is not too bad, with power outages being limited to one or two hours at the most, which the most critical piece of operation—the electric arc furnace—can sustain. A state-of-the-art laboratory equipped with spectrographs capable of analysing hot metal test pieces in a few minutes to carry out in-operation corrections to its chemistry has made RWF a technology powerhouse in the field of railways for forged special steel axles and cast steel wheels.
Source-FE
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