RINL to Make 55,000 Wheels in FY24 to Meet Indian Railways' Demand
State owned steel manufacturer Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd is all set to produce 55,000 wheels in the current fiscal year to meet the increasing demand from the Indian Railways, according to the company's CMD, Mr. Atul Bhatt. According to Mr. Bhatt, the targeted 50% utilization of the plant will significantly reduce dependence on imports and help the national transporter to source Made in India wheels of better quality compared to imported wheels. The forged wheels produced by RINL Rae Bareli can meet the requirement of high-speed trains that run at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour. The CMD further added that there is a potential to double the annual capacity of the plant to 200,000 wheels with the addition of a few facilities to meet the domestic as well as the demand in the international markets.
The company has recently set up a new plant at Lalganj in Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh with an estimated cost of ?2,350 crore. The plant has a capacity to manufacture 100,000 forged rail wheels per annum. SMS group, along with Niles-Simmons-Hegenscheidt, has supplied & commissioned fully automated railroad wheel plant on a turnkey basis, with a capacity to produce 100,000 wheels per year. The facility can be expanded to 200,000 wheels per year and the main customers are Indian railroad repair shops. The plant features the world's first turnkey installation for fully contour-machined railroad wheels, with SMS providing buildings, equipment, infrastructure, water management, and the wheel rolling line, while NSH supplied wheels, QT systems, and mechanical contour machining units. The manufacturing process involves round billets being shortened by saws, homogeneously heated in a rotary hearth furnace, forged into a wheel blank, and then rolled out on the wheel rolling machine to its full diameter.
RINL commissioned a new continuous casting machine, supplied by SMS Concast, in 2018, which has a casting radius of twelve meters and a rated capacity of 1 million metric tons per year. The five-strand continuous casting machine has increased Vizag Steel’s product range with the introduction of round bloom sections of 410 and 450 millimeters in diameter, in addition to 200 millimeters square sections. The new continuous casting machine has all the technological features required to produce steel grades of the highest quality, including a submerged pouring system with electro-mechanical stopper flow control system, hydraulic mold oscillation, mold and final electromagnetic stirrers, and a product marking system. It also has state-of-the-art Level 1 and Level 2 automation systems that ensure efficient operation of the machine with minimal personnel requirements while controlling and monitoring all required process parameters and capturing all key product data for digital production and quality tracking.
The steel maker started supplying wheels in December 2021 when the first consignment of 51 loco wheels was flagged off from its Rae Bareli unit in Uttar Pradesh to the Railways. In the last financial year, RINL supplied 2,465 loco wheels and 2,639 LHB wheels to the Indian Railways. The Preliminary Acceptance Certificate has been issued for the plant, and very soon, production will be ramped up to meet the demand of the Railways.