The development of variable gauge bogies is presented as an alternative to transshipment and bogie changing methods. The cross-border freight transport with rolling stock equipped with variable gauge systems helps reduce logics cycles and transport costs.
The different types of gauges in Europe pose problems to the international freight traffic requiring the transshipment of goods or changing the bogies of cars at frontiers which significantly increase the travel time. Some manufactures are counteracting these problems by building automatic variable gauge changing systems.
A long-standing tradition manufacturer is Talgo which has a system developed since the end of the 1960s by which it allows passenger trains to run on tracks with different gauges, named “Talgo RD”. In 1995 Talgo developed an application of this system for the axles of freight wagons, mainly because of the great potential market between the European Union, countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS countries. “Currently, we are involved in improving the freight bogie design in order to lower the manufacturing costs and to make the product accessible to all markets”, declared Mario Oriol, Marketing Manager, Patentes Talgo, Spain.
CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles) has developed its own variable gauge bogie system, called BRAVA, allowing railway vehicles to adapt to any type of gauge while travelling and in only 3 seconds. “This rolling system developed by CAF can be applied to any type of passenger train, regardless of its origin and technology. Currently, the BRAVA system is under study for freight wagons”, declared Aitor Llorente, International Division – Area Manager, CAF, Spain.
Using this type of technologies in rolling stock manufacturing increases the real capacity to transport all types of materials by rail to the real capacity of the line and not to the capacity of the installations at border points and diminishes the cost of border installations for the expected growth in the flow of freight transport. “Today in freight traffic which involves bogie changing or transshipment of materials at border points with different track gauges, the capacity to transport goods is limited by the capacity of these changing stations and this usually created bottlenecks. With the use of the variable gauge system, this bottleneck disappears as well as the need to change bogies or do transshipment (always very time consuming) disappears”, said Mario Oriol.
Transport operators benefit from the great opportunity of using the same vehicle from departure to arrival without changing the vehicles at border points; thus, frontier bottlenecks disappear for countries with different types of gauges and the overall transport time is reduced.
Eliminating the transshipment operations at the border points of countries with different types of gauges increases the volumes shipped on rails between Eastern Europe (1520 mm gauge) and Western Europe (1435 mm), as well as between the Mediterranean Sea and the Baltic Sea. Moreover, this definitively solves the inherent problems a railway border points between pan-European corridors and Eurasian corridors.
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