today 141
today 141
The railway is experiencing an unparalleled upswing. More cost efficient, safer, and more sustainable than all other transport systems, it has turned out to be the mobility concept of the future par excellence. Plasser & Theurer is part of the railway and has been working on enhancing this system’s appeal from the very beginning. With track maintenance and track construction being among the most efficient industrial fields of activity today, the proof is there. That is because Plasser & Theurer was and is behind many of the crucial innovations in this field.
In the early 1950s, the company recognized that the mechanization of track work would be a decisive factor in the development of the railway system. What was missing above all was a tamping technology that could consistently withstand the enormous amount of loading on the track. By inventing tamping machines with hydraulic squeezing, operating according to the principle of “non-synchronous constant pressure tamping”, that gap was filled. Today, this innovation is the gold standard in tamping technology. The mechanization process could begin, and Plasser & Theurer played a major role in it: the company holds 936 patents for tamping technology alone and a total of 2,500 active patents.
Manual work processes, such as levelling, lifting, and aligning the track, were successively integrated into the machines. Finally, 1967 saw the launch of compaction and profiling machines: they made it possible to offer the very first fully mechanized maintenance train. 1,300 working hours for maintaining 1 km of track turned into 130 hours: savings of nearly 90%.
With the aim of driving the mechanization process, in a short time Plasser & Theurer developed machines for new tasks, such as ballast bed cleaning or formation rehabilitation. The company intensified its efforts to integrate various work processes into larger machine systems. The SUZ 2000 high-speed track renewal train was a milestone in this development. Launched in 1968, it was possible for the first time to lay tracks using the continuous assembly-line method. The main features of this machine technology continue to be used in the modern, more powerful track renewal trains of today.
The assembly-line method was also decisive in improving other machine types. In particular, with tamping machines the transition from cyclic to continuous working action was possible. It was no longer necessary for the machine to stop for every single tamping process: by decoupling the tamping unit frame from the machine frame, the machine could travel and work at the same speed. This provided enormous relief for machine personnel and, at the same time, signalled the beginning of significantly higher working speeds. Where a cyclic-action 1-sleeper tamping machine could tamp 500 m of track an hour, a continuous-action 4-sleeper tamping machine in modern design is able to tamp more than 2,600 m of track in the same amount of time.
The vision of completely mechanizing track construction became reality. As a full-range supplier, Plasser & Theurer provides machine technologies for practically every work process: tamping, ballast management, stabilization and compaction, ballast cleaning, formation rehabilitation, material logistics, track renewal and track laying, mobile rail treatment, measuring work – the ideal machine concept is available for every requirement. Nevertheless, new technologies are still necessary. Three major drivers are behind this: sustainability, the shortage of skilled workers, and the digitalization of the railway.
Even with the machines always contributing to climate protection as part of the most environmentally friendly transport system, Plasser & Theurer is addressing the topic of sustainability from a technological point of view. The first hybrid track maintenance machines were made by Plasser & Theurer and went into service in 2015. Equipped with E³ drive technologies, they use the electrical energy from the contact wire or battery power, reducing local emissions – of both pollutants and noise – to a minimum on the worksite. The largest order in the company’s history, which was awarded following an EU-wide invitation to tender, confirms this role as an environmental pioneer. The Austrian company will supply 56 vehicles to the ÖBB’s green maintenance fleet, with an option available for an additional 46 vehicles.
The topic of digitalization is creating an equally strong momentum. It opens completely new opportunities for our machines and infrastructure, which is why Plasser & Theurer is pursuing it so intensely. One example of this is our Plasser TampingAssistant, the modular turnout tamping assistance system. For the first time, this system makes it possible to automatically perform all the steps involved in turnout tamping from start to finish. Another example is the EM-VT track inspection vehicle series: it is equipped with the latest measuring systems featuring 360° 3D laser scanners and high-resolution colour cameras, among other things. With these vehicles it is possible to completely measure a 50 km railway line within two days and provide all the data for generating a digital twin. Experts agree that this is ushering in a new era of railway infrastructure planning, one in which planning processes speed up significantly and costs go down drastically.
Even with all of these futuristic technologies, our family company is more than just a manufacturer. Our machines are in operation for decades, which must be taken into account for our servicing solutions. Customers across the globe can count on a network with 22 partner companies. In addition, our highly dynamic Customer Services team is an organization which supports customers over the entire service life of their machines. When it comes to customer services, one fact alone reflects how great the demand is: out of 17,400 machines that have been delivered, 50% are still in operation.
Find out more about the history of our company at www.plassertheurer.com.
