UWC freight cars undergo first scheduled repairs
Dmitry Losev, Deputy CEO, Technical Development, at RPC “United Wagon Company”, spoke at the IVth Annual Conference “Operation and Repair of Freight Cars”.
In his report, Dmitry Losev told about the results of operation and first scheduled maintenance of freight cars manufactured by Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant. The speaker noted that this was only a small number of freight cars built in 2013 intended to serve for 4 years before their first depot maintenance (in 2015, the run between repairs for all UWC’s freight cars was extended to 8 years, or 800 thousand km).
The scheduled maintenance included only a few operations: wheelset turning, standard reassembly, and the measurement of assemblies and parts. The results of the inspection measurement proved positive expert forecasts in terms of the indicators of wear of the main components of running gears: these freight cars will run 1.1-1.2 mn km, before the main friction parts of bogies and wheelsets reach their wear limit.
Dmitry Losev further noted that the company continuously monitors its freight cars under operation. “Collecting the data, we analyze it and, if necessary, adjust the design documentation accordingly. More than 1.5 thousand of our freight cars manufactured in Tikhvin, have run above 400 thousand km. A quarter of them have not even had to be uncoupled for the current uncoupling repair, and the main reason for those uncouplings that did occur was just the need to do the wheelset turning operation. There are freight cars which have run more than 500 thousand km each, and a third of them have not been sent to the current uncoupling repair. We prepared a complete set of documents and mastered the technology of large-scale scheduled maintenance at our main service center “Titran-Express”. We will soon submit this documentation to our partner service centers for them to successfully perform scheduled maintenance across the entire railway network,” said Dmitry Losev.