Wheel Wear Management on High-Speed Passenger Rail: A Common Playground for Design and Maintenance Engineering in the Talgo Engineering Cycle

Talgo’s focus on engineering excellence has helped the group to deliver innovative rail products to the market since 1942. Patentes Talgo S.A. (PTSA) provides passenger rail administrations around the world with high speed cars and locomotives, car maintenance equipment and maintenance services. The paper outlines the US experience of Talgo’s Total Logistics Care (TLC) maintenance program, summarizing Talgo’s maintenance approach, practice and overall results. The preventive and corrective maintenance program, the continuous trainset monitoring and the maintenance & design engineering cycle will be covered among other topics. Rolling assembly maintenance and wheel wear management are the two focal points of this paper. Talgo’s rolling assembly design has evolved over 60 years taking full advantage of the design-maintenance engineering cycle. Maintenance engineers and technicians, wheel assembly design engineers and maintenance equipment design engineers work together on a daily basis to improve the design of the rolling assembly and reduce maintenance costs and wheel wear. Enhanced guidance systems and other design improvements help to reduce flange wear on independent axle wheelsets. Also, five decades of in-house maintenance and wheel turning experience using Talgo pit lathes revealed the cutting parameters and frequencies to maximize wheel life. Both wheel wear management design and maintenance practices will be reviewed in the paper.