Calgary awards ARM rail grinding contract
Written by William C. Vantuono, Editor-In-Chief, Railway Age
The city of Calgary is getting ready for an intensive rail grinding effort on its transit lines.
The city of Calgary has awarded Advanced Rail Management (Canada) Inc. a one-year contract, with four option years, for rail grinding services on the Calgary Transit CTrain light rail system.
ARM will review the existing conditions and develop and execute a rail grinding program to remove corrugation, surface cracking, and gradually restore the design rail profile on open and tunnel main line track, including the at-grade embedded track sections in the downtown area, on the Blue and Red lines across the 74.4 track-mile (37.2 route-mile double-track) system. ARM will measure and analyze rail roughness, corrugation, wear, and surface defects on the system. From that, it will develop and supervise the grinding program through on-site field management to optimize track time and metal removal rates for the grinding program. The plan is to address the Blue and Red lines alternately each year.
ARM will provide the rail grinding equipment along with field supervision and quality control of the grinding unit “to ensure that the desired rail profile and surface conditions are achieved.”
“We will select the appropriate grinding patterns to minimize the required grinding effort,” said ARM Chief Technical Officer Mark Riemer. “We will also perform post-grinding measurement and inspection to validate the post-grind rail roughness and corrugation levels.”
ARM also will train and work with Calgary Transit’s in-house grinding crews on the use of hand tools to properly assess rail profile, and on pattern selection and grinding techniques to remove corrugation and “achieve the desired rail profile with the least amount of grinding effort.”
Advanced Rail Management (Canada), headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and a Global Rail Trust company, is a consulting/services firm that “provides expertise in all aspects of wheel/rail interaction to railways and transit systems.”
Read more articles on track maintenance.
