Manufacturing
The Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant is reckoned as a high-tech innovation enterprise, which meets the modern world standards in the sphere of transport machine building. Car assembling and foundry engineering have been combined in an effective production tandem that provides high productivity, flexibility of the production process and high quality level of manufactured products.The Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant is in the vanguard of transfer of western know-how technologies to the domestic transport machine building, and is supposed to be a unique enterprise with regard to its range of activities performed, the level of integration of innovative solutions and the investment volume.
The Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant imaged in figures (annually):
- Plant capacities for the car production – 13 000 freight cars, 65 000 wheel sets
- Plant capacities for the foundry– 90 000 t of heavy and medium-size car castings
- Total area – 50 hectares
- Production floor area– 233 000 m²
- Total investment volume – exceeds USD 1 bln.
The plant will manufacture 4 types of freight cars designed by Starfire Engineering&Technologies (USA) jointly with the Railcar-Building Engineering Centre (Russia) on the basis of Barber S-2-R bogie with the axle load of 23.5 t and 25 t designed by Standard Car Truck (USA) and a standard bogie of domestic design.
The result achieved from cooperation of global leaders and domestic designers as well as implementation of innovative technical solutions have allowed to design fundamentally new gondola cars that satisfy the up-to-date requirements of the car building and the development strategy for the Russian railway transport.
Taking into consideration the enhanced technical & economic indexes, application performances, design solutions, operating reliability and economical efficiency, the cars manufactured by the Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant are advantageously distinct from Russian analogs and are able to compete with modern models being at the disposal of a foreign rolling stock.
Plant's railcars are characterized by the increased lift capacity, reduced tare weight, increased freight train speed, increased strength and service life, reduced expenses spent on maintenance and repair activities, low costs of the life cycle.
The differential peculiarity of cars manufactured by the Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant is expressed in an innovative bogie of the Barber S-2-R type, which design provides the increased distance run between overhauls, extended service life of wear resistant parts, reduced impact on a rail track, as well as increased car speed resulting as a whole in a considerable increase of the traffic capacity of Russian railways.
The rolling stock of the new generation produced at the Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant is in compliance with the most important strategic directions of the Russian Railways Innovative Development up to 2015 (Russian Railways White Paper).
