Deutsche Bahn relies on high-speed grinding and rail milling as key technologies for future-oriented maintenance and awards contracts worth well over €100 million to Vossloh

Vossloh and DB InfraGO AG, the Deutsche Bahn AG subsidiary responsible for rail infrastructure, are further expanding their long-standing and successful cooperation. The two companies have concluded multi-year framework agreements with a total sales volume of well over €100 million. These agreements cover both corrective maintenance (rail milling) and preventive rail maintenance (high-speed grinding). Rail milling and high-speed grinding are key technologies for the maintenance of Deutsche Bahn's rail network and will make a decisive contribution to extending the service life and increasing the availability of the rail track in the future.

"We are very pleased about the renewed trust of our important customer, which reflects the successful partnership between Vossloh and Deutsche Bahn. Our comprehensive service portfolio enables us to offer our customers individually tailored maintenance solutions. A perfect example is the symbiosis of rail milling and high-speed grinding using HSG technology. Milling eliminates rail defects and restores the rail to perfect condition. We maintain this condition with our globally unique technology of high-speed grinding working in train timetable. The combination not only maximizes the service life of the tracks, but also significantly increases their availability by avoiding future construction and slow running points. Customers benefit from lower operating costs, increased safety in rail traffic and significantly improved efficiency in maintenance," explains Oliver Schuster, CEO of Vossloh AG.

Heike Junge-Latz, Member of the Board of Management responsible for Plant and Maintenance Management at DB InfraGO AG, explains: "An efficient and highly available infrastructure is the key to improving punctuality in rail traffic. With these framework agreements, we are relying on state-of-the-art technologies for our network, which will significantly help to improve the quality of our infrastructure. As part of the general modernization that is underway, we will completely renew our highly utilized rail network, construction project by construction project. Our high-performance maintenance strategy, including the combination of rail milling and high-speed grinding, complements the refurbishment and aims to permanently maintain the high level of quality achieved."

The framework agreement for high-speed grinding has a term of two years and can be extended twice by one year each time. Vossloh's self-developed, globally unique HSG technology is a form of preventive maintenance that corrects minor rail defects at an early stage and thus prevents the development of serious defects, significantly extending the service life of the rails. With a working speed of up to 80 km/h, the machine can operate alongside with freight traffic at night and eliminates the need for track closures required by other methods. The work, covering at least 13,000 km per year, will mainly be carried out on Germany's most utilized routes, the so-called high-performance network of Deutsche Bahn. Advanced digital measurement and analysis technologies will be used, which not only record the grinding performance, but also collect and evaluate key condition data during the crossing. Relevant information is derived from this using highly developed algorithms, visualized via a web-based application and provided in the form of specific recommendations for action.

The second framework agreement for rail and switch milling covers a period of four years, with the option of a one-off extension of two years. Rail milling is used for rail defects of greater depth that can no longer be corrected economically by grinding. Milling enables the efficient removal of such serious rail defects and the precise reprofiling of the railhead at the same time. Milling rails is the logistically and economically much more attractive alternative to replacing a defective rail string. In addition to significantly lower costs and a substantially reduced track closure time, milling also saves natural resources by extending the use of the installed rail compared to rail replacement, which optimizes the ecological footprint of the rail network. Vossloh has a uniquely broad milling technology portfolio consisting of large milling trains for mainline railroads, flexible two-way milling trucks and the newly developed VTM-compact milling machine for use on short lines and switches as well as in tunnels. The VTM-compact recently received user approval from Deutsche Bahn and is now being used as a universal hotspot milling machine for correcting rail and switch faults on the Deutsche Bahn network.