BENGALURU: After a shutdown effected for a little over six months due to the switch over of its furnace to an eco-friendly fuel, the first train wheel from the Rail Wheel Factory (RWF) rolled out of its workshop on Tuesday. It had reopened a month ago and after much testing, the first product using the new fuel has been churned out.
RWF is the leading supplier of wheels and axles for the Indian Railways. For the first time since its inception in 1984, the Wheel Shop of RWF had shut shop for such a long period.
A senior RWF official told The New Indian Express, “Our private suppliers have been waiting for the wheels for quite some time as we had shut our furnace on February 18 this year. We have now begun our deliveries and are churning out 124 wheels per day. From Monday, we will resume full production and our factory will work 24x7.”
RWF manufactures an average of 670 wheels and 250 axles per day. It also manufactures 250 wheelsets (two wheels bridged together with an axle) daily. During the shutdown, only the axles could be manufactured. “The melting, cast mould of wheels were done during the last six months but the heating of the wheel could not be done due to the closure of the furnace,” the official said.
The Rotary Hearth Normalising Furnace, which can discharge a wheel a minute, was run only on High-Speed Diesel (HSD), and the switch over to Purified Natural Gas (PNG) has been effected to make the factory eco-friendly, another official said. “It will reduce the production cost of each wheel and give us an annual savings of Rs 17 crore.”
Apart from Indian Railways, RWF supplies products to public sector units like CONCOR and Braithwaite and private concerns like Jindal, Titagarh, HEI, Texmaco, and Jupiter.
The project was carried out by WESMAN Engineering Private Limited at a cost of Rs 20.98 crores. With the conversion of this furnace, all five furnaces at RWF now run on PNG.