Proposal of En19 & En24 steels to face major challenges in indigenized track maintenance machines for Indian railway

Abstract

The objective of the present review is to describe the basics of railway track maintenance & to explain the need of the indigenization of some important parts of different machines for Indian railways, which needs regular replacement & bears the heavy cost of import. Indian railway uses two important maintenance machines (a tamping machine unit & ballast cleaning machine Unit), which earlier were imported from an Austrian company Plasser & Theurer. While localizing parts in India, two important alloy steel materials are generally proposed are En19 and En24. This paper also gives the basic idea and properties of the above materials which are desirable and match with German standards, and therefore can be used to fabricate some important parts in Indian railway maintenance machines. Along with the above, the current work will also find the limitations & challenges faced by the Indian railway while using the above materials in some specific components of maintenance machines. Thus this work finds the research gap in which further work & research could be done to increase the self-reliance capability of the Indian railway.