Rail freight UK

On Friday 5 April, the Inspector of Railways for the Office for Road and Rail (ORR), Richard Hines, visited GB Railfreight’s (GBRf) new £5.75 million Maintenance Hub in Peterborough to see their new wagon maintenance technology. This was the newly appointed Inspector of Railways first visit to the new Maintenance Hub and he was welcomed by John Smith, CEO of GBRf. The Inspector was shown the latest condition monitoring technology GBRf is developing with Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (Wabtec).

At the Maintenance Hub, GBRf is using the latest Wabtec systems ‘Wheel View’ and ‘TrainView’, which have high speed and high definition digital imaging technology to give reliable automatic inspections on wagons. The Maintenance Hub is not just able to do more accurate monitoring, but it is able to analyse four wagons per shift, with it being the size of six Olympic swimming pools.

GB Railfreight will look to route all wagons through its new Maintenance Hub, reducing the maintenance downtime of its wagons meaning that current and future customers to move an even wider range of goods by rail.