Sweden already set an example in terms of climate protection in 1991 by introducing a carbon tax. The country shows great interest in environmentally friendly drive systems; therefore, our electrically powered E³ machine was a major hit. Equally, the electrically powered tamping units emit far less noise, which was a pleasant surprise.
The deployment on eight selected line sections demonstrated to the participating companies the potential that modern sensor technology offers for the further development of maintenance strategies. The machine demonstrated what a complete end-to-end process looks like in practice – from pre-measuring to semi-automatic maintenance to post-measuring and creation of the acceptance report. The focus was on detecting the condition of the ballast and the fixed-point measuring system.
The “sensing” tamping tines detect the condition of the ballast more or less while tamping takes place (the operating principle is explained in more detail here). The data provided supplements and updates existing records and can be verified through trial excavations of the ballast.
The track geometry measuring system allows the track to be surveyed at much higher speeds than before using the tamping machine itself. The combination of the fixed-point measuring system and the inertial measurement unit (IMU) determines both the relative and absolute track geometry. This increased accuracy has an especially high impact on high-speed lines. We were able to present and discuss the results directly afterwards.
