6. Railway

Industry: Railway

• Application: High-speed switch blade head hardening and normalizing
• Key factor in this GH Solution: Application expertise and versatile design
• Customer benefits: New market and production increase

Since the high-speed service is being deployed worldwide, the technical requirements in tracks are becoming more and more stringent. A new European Standard on forged rail transitions is being prepared. The switch blade manufacturing customer needed to upgrade its production facility in order to offer the new high-speed product. Initially the new product volume was small making the initial investment an economically unfeasible project.

GH Group offered a flexible installation that allowed head hardening of the high-speed switch blades and normalizing for all forged blades. The key components in the solution were: changing oscillator depending on the process and the application engineers that were able to meet the railway standard requirements.

Finally the installation became a less than one year payback project and the customer could compete in a new market.