Thermit^® welding techniques
With the Thermit^® welding process practically all known types of rail can be continuously joined together, regardless of their rail head profile or composition. Central to the manufacture of high quality welds is the training and competency of the welders, and technical support including site assessment, product development, fault diagnosis, and procedure development.

We provide training courses for all levels of welding staff – including operators, weld inspectors, welding and track design engineers – and assist with the development of standards and operating procedures and represent the industry on international technical working groups.

Electrical welding
Mobile welding equipment is available for the on-site repair of rails, switches and crossings. While maintenance welding principally focuses on crossings and isolated rail surface damage, there are procedures for the repair of rail wear in severely trafficked or curved track.

Anticipated protective welding on new rails to prevent wear and screeching is a speciality realized in our factory. The different welding procedures in use are:

• the submerged arc welding technique
• the manual metal electric arc method, and
• the Flux-core wire technique

Special grinding equipment is used to restore the rebuilt rail to either its original profile, or to a customer specified profile.

Installing insulating joints and fishplates
In addition to our welding technology, our product portfolio includes the installation of our MT or ETW insulated joints. These types of joints mainly differ due to the way they absorb forces. The MT joint incorporates insulated fishplates which are locked to to fishing surfaces of the rail by means of high tensile bolts and primarily transmits the forces from the ends of the rail due to the wedge effect of the fishplates. The ETW joint almost exclusively transmits forces from the ends of the rail to the fishplates through the adhesive bond between the rail and the glued-in insulating lining with glass-fibre reinforcement.

Training and consultation
Our Technical Service resources provide support with the introduction of innovative technology into the market, and with the subsequent training of customer’s personnel, which may be either hands-on training courses, or the provision of procedures to customers who have their own training resources. (You can get more information from our branch offices in each local county).