VOSSLOH says it has successfully developed a customised milling tool that is supporting the corrective maintenance of grooved rails to reduce noise emissions on Rheinbahn’s light rail network in Düsseldorf.

Rheinbahn wanted to prevent the removal and subsequent replacement of the sealing compound used on the rails. Vossloh subsequently came up with the tool which combines a positive-tangent cutting angle from the middle of the rail head and a cutting zone that extends over the inside edge of the milling wheel.

“Adding cutting tips to the wheel flange allows grooved rails to be fully machined, and that includes the bottom of the groove up to the gauge corner," says Mr Steffen Riedel, technical sales engineer responsible for the project. "While the keyed-in cutting zone ensures that we only remove as much metal from the rail as necessary, cutting down an extra millimetre with larger removal rates guarantees that vehicles’ wheels will rotate freely.”

The tool is installed on a road-rail milling truck, which maximises deployment during short overnight possessions. The trials took place this spring and are set to be performed as service order as required along with the use of Vossloh’s HSG-city solution, which Vossloh has been performing on the network for around five years.