STRONG AS STEEL

Martina

22 rolls-royce.com

Nearly six million tonnes of steel a year is produced by the Voestalpine steelworks and it all needs to be transported.

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ISSUE 145 23 the magazine

STRONG AS STEEL

MartinaThese locomotives, made by Gmeinder, are powered by Type 12V 1600 R50 MTU rail engines.

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t the Voestalpine steelworks rail yard in the Austrian town of Linz on the River Danube they need powerful partners. Proper heavyweights like the Gmeinder shunting locomotives. They

shift trains loaded with all sorts of goods and raw materials.Inside their engine bays are the hard-working MTU Series

1600 rail engines from Rolls-Royce. These were first introduced in 2013 and now play a big part in the distribution of Voestalpine’s products to end users all over the world. The shunters are operated by Voestalpine’s own logistics provider, LogServ.

As many as 28 locomotives are in service at the Linz works of Austria’s leading steelmaker. The company produces 5.8 million tonnes of crude steel a year. One of the locomotives is called Martina. She and her sister shunting engines shift empty wagons as well as trains loaded with steel, scrap or iron ore.

Martina is the first D60 C Class shunting locomotive produced by the South German train-maker Gmeinder, she was named after the wife of the company’s owner. This small red and grey shunter now hauls around as much as 3,000 tonnes of steel on every trip. No mean feat for the petitely proportioned Martina, who measures only 10.76m long and 3.08m wide. And it is precisely because of her size that the three-axled locomotive is so well loved. “We need shunters that are shorter than the standard locomotives so that they can be used in the area of the blast furnaces where space is restricted,” explains Thomas Leitner, radio-control engine driver at LogServ. He has been working as a train driver for two years and today is the first driver assigned to Martina.

“As a supply driver, I am posted to a different part of the Voestalpine works every day,” the young Austrian explains. “That means every day is always different and I have new challenges all the time.” Martina, like the other identically powered Gmeinder locomotives, works every inch of track at the steelworks. They shunt fully laden and empty wagons back and forth between the various sheds for loading and unloading. All four of the shunting engines are decked out in the LogServ livery with just the cab and a few borders in red and the rest in grey. “The distinctive red and grey markings make them easily distinguishable from the Austrian Federal Railway locomotives,” points out Dietmar Schall, Head of

Design and Development at Gmeinder. The Voestalpine branch line in Linz has three connections to the national rail network, one heading towards Salzburg, one for Vienna and one to an Austrian Federal Railway marshalling yard.

Thomas Leitner has been working through the wide variety of tasks on his job schedule together with his shunter Johann Ortner and apprentice shunter Christian Mijokovic since 5.15am. Today they have been on the early shift. The Voestalpine steelworks is in operation 365 days a year with a

four-shift working day. Despite their early start, the three are in good spirits. At 6°C the temperature is relatively warm on this particular morning. That is one thing they can be thankful for. “I have been standing on the footplate at minus 30°C with icicles hanging from my chin before now,” recalls Johann Ortner. The three colleagues are all wearing conspicuously padded neon-yellow jackets and gloves. In the driver’s cab the heating is on full blast. “Having to deal with all sorts of weather conditions, fog and the dark are the biggest challenges for us. We are often battling against poor visibility, Leitner recounts. “And the noise and the dirt are not to be underestimated either, but it’s all part of the job.”

A

Left In the dock shed, steel is consigned for shipping by rail, river or road.

Right The MTU 1600 diesel rail engine.

The main square of Linz in Austria.

ISSUE 145 25 the magazine

Thomas Leitner already gives the impression of an old hand. He scrutinises the small screen on the control panel. It shows the upcoming jobs. He can see precisely how many wagons need to be moved and how many of them are empty or loaded. That is important because the heavier the payload, the longer the train’s stopping distance. Leitner knows these tracks like the back of his hand. He skilfully moves Martina to the next group of empty wagons using his radio remote control. Very few of the train drivers at Voestalpine actually work from inside the cab. The remote control allows them to be mobile. That means they can stand outside the cab or even at the side of the track to get a better view of the situation. Precisely what Leitner is now doing. Martina has to shunt a total of 13 empty wagons into a shed. The locomotives are allowed to travel at speeds of up to 40kph in the factory grounds.

LeadingShortly before they reach the empty wagons, Ortner gets off the locomotive. As shunter he has to couple and uncouple the wagons. Martina is hooked up to the wagons at the back. For this job, Johann Ortner stands on the track between the buffers of the leading wagon. Then everything happens very quickly. Thomas Leitner carefully drives Martina up to the buffers of the wagon and Johann Ortner couples the two together. “In the beginning you feel rather uneasy having to stand on the track, but eventually it becomes routine,” Ortner reveals. “When you’ve been doing it for a few years you can judge quite well whether a locomotive is approaching too fast. If it is, you don’t stand in between. Trust is very important.” Added to that, all shunters and engine drivers have to be able to work together because they could be working with different people every day.

It is only when hooked up to a train that Martina is able to show her real strengths. “The engines play a big part in our work,” explains Leitner. “It’s like with cars, the more power they have, the more fun they are to drive.” Large numbers of load changes and long hours of duty – those are precisely the conditions that the MTU Series 1600 was designed for, and that makes them ideal for shunting locomotives. So it is quite likely that in the coming years more of the Gmeinder locomotives at the Voestalpine works will be fitted out with

Above Shunter Johann Ortner’s job is not without risks – he has to couple and uncouple the wagons on the tracks.

Below The Gmeinder locomotives shift trains loaded with raw materials weighing up to 3,000 tonnes.

The engines play a big part in our work. It’s like with cars, the more power they have, the more fun they are to drive.

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town within a townThe Voestalpine steelworks is almost a town in its own right within the city of Linz. With 160km of track, its railway system is as large as the system for the whole state of Vorarlberg. Altogether there are 600 different loading points. Three-lane roads in the factory

grounds, traffic lights and a factory gate like a motorway toll barrier in Italy are some of the more remarkable features. The 11,000 employees produce 5.8 million tonnes of crude steel a year. As many as 265,000 railway trucks pass through the Voestalpine steelworks every year. That is 730 wagons in 24 hours.

MTU engines. To be passed for duty at the steelworks, all locomotives – and that means their engines as well – have to complete a load capacity test. “The tracks of the ‘iron ore elevated line’ go right up to the blast furnace transfer bunkers. That is a 1 in 50 gradient, after all,” says Mario Pointner, the man in charge of works railway transport at LogServ. The locomotives and engines are not allowed onto the rest of the rail system until they have passed that load capacity test.

Surrounded It is now 1.15pm. Thomas Leitner and his two colleagues have reached the end of their shift. But not Martina. In the middle of the steelworks rail yard, surrounded by empty wagons and other locomotives, she is already waiting for her next two assistants. A couple of tracks over from Martina another red and grey Gmeinder locomotive is just passing. It is on its way into what is known as the dock shed to pick up a set of wagons loaded with steel where ships can be loaded here as well as trains. As the steelworks is right on the banks of the Danube, ships can sail straight into the shed from the river in a specially built dock. Variously sized rolls of thin sheet steel known as coils and steel plates are stored there.

Martina is on her way again with her new shunting team, Markus Klopf and Andreas Müller. The first challenge is to move 30 wagons to the dock shed. With that many trucks the train is all of 400m long and so substantially bigger than the ones she was handling earlier this morning. The fastest runners in the world can cover that distance in about 45 seconds, whereas the man acting as shunter today, Andreas Müller, requires a little longer. From the locomotive cab, you cannot even see the end of the train. So Markus Klopf has to rely entirely on his colleague, who is now standing on the step of the leading wagon. Martina shunts the wagons from

behind. “Because I have a remote control, I can step outside the cab,” explains Klopf. “So I can walk alongside the train to be able to see more.” Müller issues instructions via walkie-talkie. Each two-man team has to pick a separate walkie-talkie channel so as not to get interference from other people’s communications. “If I don’t hear or don’t follow the instructions from Andreas it could have dire consequences,” Klopf consciously states. Instructions such as telling him when a signal is showing ‘shunting limit’ or ‘shunting limit lifted’; or later on in the shed when the train has reached the end of the track. Teamwork is absolutely the top priority. The long shunting train moves carefully into the shed. For the last few centimetres very precise control is called for. Once the last wagons come to a halt, Martina is relieved of her heavy burden. Then it is off to her next assignment while her crew changes over again.

Author: yvonne Wirth is a member of the Mtu Communications team in Friedrichshafen.

The end of a shift for a train crew at Voestalpine.