Rail welding is a firmly established part of railroading, but customers are seeking safer, more reliable welds and suppliers are striving to deliver.

by Tom Judge, editor

Rail welding suppliers are listening to what their customers have to say and are working hard to deliver what their railroad customers are telling them they need.

Chemetron, the rail welding division of Progress Rail Services, has added more welded rail trains and unloaders and increased its contract service fleet of in-track welders.

Chemetron

"Chemetron, the welding division of Progress Rail Services, continues to add capacity to meet the growing demand for electric flash-butt welding," said Mark McLean, manager sales. "Not only have we added more welded rail trains and unloaders, we have also increased our contract service fleet of in-track welders. Our mobile welding services have expanded to accommodate customer demand for rail preparation and finish grinding after welding.

"Chemetron has been fortunate to participate in several major transit and contractor welding projects," McLean said. "Several of these projects included rail, plant welding and delivery of cwr, as well as in-track welding of the strings to complete the project. Our ability to provide a full continuously-welded rail package is a unique benefit we can provide our customers.

"Our mobile welding services have expanded to accommodate customer demand for rail preparation and finish grinding after welding," he added.

What's in the future for rail welding?

"Electric flash-butt welding remains the preferred method of joining rails," McLean said. "We expect to see continued strong demand for our mobile and plant welding services."

During the first five months of 2010, Holland's Mobile Welding Fleet has installed nearly 50,000 welds in track.

Holland L.P.

Kevin Flaherty, general manager-sales for Holland L.P., said: "One of Holland's core values is ‘Improvement.' We continually have improvement objectives for our equipment. But more importantly, we invest in our employees' development, as well. This past year, Holland introduced our Holland Welding Institute for our own employees. Each Holland Welding Group employee will receive training and certification in all aspects of operating and maintaining our Mobile Welders®.

The real benefit to our customers has already shown up in the improvement in our performance measures. Fleet-wide, we are near 99 percent uptime, less than one percent missed welds and our productivity has improved. During the first five months of 2010, Holland's Mobile Welding Fleet has installed nearly 50,000 welds in track.

"Holland introduced the new ‘Dual Web Polisher' in 2010," Flaherty noted. "This enhances the productivity and improves the safety for the operator. In many instances this has also enabled our customers to further reduce the labor requirements in some applications.

"Continued advancements in our equipment design include additional remote connectivity and diagnostics along with more automation within the welding process, especially with regards to flash-butt closure welds," he said.

"We have continued our development of the Holland ‘Flash Butt' Slot Weld," Flaherty pointed out. "By utilizing the proven superiority of a flash-butt weld in the slot-weld application, we can bring all the quality features associated with flash-butt welding to defect elimination slot-welding applications."

Flaherty continued: "Holland has seen strong demand for Mobile Welders in 2010 and we have been responding by adding 18 percent capacity to our fleet by the end of this year. By the end of 2010 we will be operating 89 Mobile Welders®. This year, we have also seen a resurgence of welding needs for non-Class 1 railroads. Transit, shortline and regional railroad welding demands have increased.

"The current rail welding market is very strong and for the foreseeable future we expect this will continue," he said. "Advancements in technology, training and new applications have led to reduced costs of the installed Holland flash-butt weld and that has created more opportunities for Holland."

Orgo-Thermit's Full Head Repair Weld Process has installed in revenue service for evaluation on a Class 1 railroad.

Orgo-Thermit

"Orgo-Thermit, Inc., continues to offer the world's most comprehensive range of Thermit® welding kits, welding processes, crucibles and welding tools," said Dave Randolph, president. "Additionally, we are experiencing great success with our in-depth Thermit® welder training program.

"Orgo-Thermit is looking into the future, particularly in regards to high-speed rail," Randolph noted. "In January 2010, we introduced our Electronic Straight Edge with Blue Tooth technology. With requirements increasing for track quality and efficiency, this precise straightness-measuring tool is designed to measure the running surface and running edge of the rail and to create documentation of the rail geometry, therefore offering fast on-site report creation."

The Electronic Straight Edge surveys longitudinal and horizontal profiles of the railhead on Thermit® welds, electric flash-butt welds and gas-pressure welds. This technology is based on a magnetic principle for non-contact gauging of the running surface and running edge of the rail.

"This is an ideal tool, benefiting track inspectors, welding managers, rail grinding companies and research organizations for the final grinding checks," Randolph pointed out.

"As a complement to our product line, Orgo-Thermit represents PortaCo, Inc., located in Moorhead, Minn., for its line of hydraulic and gas-powered tools," he said. "By working closely with Orgo-Thermit, our partnership led to improved product design, adding to the safety features of each PortaCo tool, creating quality products with efficiency and longevity for improved productivity. A two-year warranty is offered on each of PortaCo's tools, which are produced in the United States.

"With our Full Head Repair Weld Process installed in revenue service for evaluation, we are happy to report that another Class 1 railroad is purchasing large quantities of this welding process and installing these welds in various parts of the country," Randolph said. "Another success we are experiencing is a significant increase in the amount of sales for our 1.5-inch-gap-welding process and our 2.75-inch wide-gap-welding process.

"In addition to our relationship with PortaCo, we offer a full range of welding kits for all European profiles and hardnesses for grooved rail, which is becoming increasingly popular in the United States," he noted. "Our Degradable Crucible manufacturing is 100-percent established in the U.S., part of our ongoing process of working to reduce costs.

What's ahead?

"Our Full Head Repair Weld has become attractive," Randolph said. "The benefits of this welding process-decreased installation time, elimination of a rail plug, plus two Thermit® welds-results in cost savings to the end user. An added benefit is the neutral stress-free temperature of the rail is not affected by this Thermit® welding process due to not having to cut the rail."

Railtech Boutet

"We are continuing to work and improve our Head Wash Repair Welding system," said Oliver Dolder, executive vice president and coo. "After several successful rounds of installations and results at TTCI, we are currently making additional installations in order to expand the usage of this weld to repairing defective plant welds and defective flash-butt welds. This is in addition to repairing transverse and corner-gauge defects. The simplicity of the welding system, as well as the shorter installation time needed, provides our customers an additional easy and inexpensive option to make repairs in track. We are currently making test welds with several Class 1 railroads, including Union Pacific, CN and Canadian Pacific Railway, in order to get the process approved on each of these respective railroads.

"We started producing our one-shot Crucibles in Napoleon, Ohio, in February of this year," Dolder noted. "Before that, all of our CJ Crucible came from our parent company, Railtech International, located in Raismes, France. We got a lot of support from both our local and state government for this project as it is going to create additional jobs in a part of the country that has been deeply affected by the decline of the car industry and the large number of layoffs it caused."

Dolder added: "We are continuing our study on high-carbon and high-strength rail and are designing a weld kit that is closer to the metallurgical properties of these types of special rails that will accommodate our customers who are currently using these types of rails in main line track and/or tangents and curves. We plan to make field tests at TTCI later this year."

RibbonWeld designed its own mobile welder, with improvements.

RibbonWeld

RibbonWeld President Gary Bevills said: "At RibbonWeld, we have designed our own mobile welder and have made the following improvements, which help the customers and RibbonWeld, as well:

"1. We have added a five-point contact that improves the vertical crown to meet and exceed the customer's specifications.

"2. Our controls have a human interface control that is, simply put, operator friendly with our complex control system.

"3. We have a wireless connection that allows a technician many miles away to observe the operation of our welder or repair and our controls can see the entire operation of the welder thru the camera system we have installed.

"4. We have all U.S.-made components for the welder.

"5. We have successfully made what we call super-low-consumption welds. This is where we use only 5/8-inch steel to make a weld. This results in a great labor savings for the Class 1s in repair welding gangs.

"Another feature that we have added is a tool to ensure more up time and, with the complexity of the computer age, it makes troubleshooting easier and much quicker," he noted.

RibbonWeld received a contract on CSX Transportation for the year 2010. "It has been very successful and we are negotiating a contract for more machines and additional years," Bevills said. "Also we are working extremely closely with two other Class 1s for welding contracts for 2011,

"RibbonWeld views the rail welding market as being very strong and our goals are to double our sales in 2011 by being more efficient and to build more equipment," Bevills stated.