Irish Rail turns to Romax to provide expertise for Right First Time failure solving

Irish Rail, a national provider of rail and related services in Ireland, has turned to Romax to help track the cause of rolling stock bearing failures.

Irish Rail approached Romax after it started to experience several incidences of premature breakdown in rolling element bearings resulting in serious impact to the running of the business. The company was expected to provide bearings with a service life of 3 million km, but some were failing at only 750,000 km.

Irish Rail sought out Romax as an expert third party to provide a detailed review and analysis, and this proved to be the best solution to a long-standing issue. As a leader in engineering consultancy and software solution provider, Romax has vast experience dealing with gearbox and bearings in the rail industry.

As part of the root cause analysis, Romax performed a full review of design and service data, physical analysis of bearings and simulation and modeling using in-house developed software RomaxDesigner. These steps were taken to make sure that the root causes were methodically studied. Alongside this Romax provided three reports, showing a process to eliminate non-contributing root causes with recommendations and suggestions for additional ways to mitigate risk. Irish Rail is now able to rule out certain issues that contribute to its axle box bearings problems.

Damien Lambert, Technical Support Manager, Irish Rail: “At Irish Rail, we carry over 40 million passengers a year and are responsible for all internal intercity, commuter and freight services and, with Northern Ireland Railways, the service between Dublin and Belfast – with this in mind its fair to say continuity of service is key to our business,”

“When we started seeing an increasing number of bearing failures in a particular fleet of rolling stock, it was imperative that we tracked down the cause and that is when we decided to engage an independent investigator.

“We approached Romax because of its reputation and wealth of experience with modeling and, as a public service organisation, there is a lot of pressure to make sure that our business is always running efficiently. The expert engineers we were assigned were incredibly professional and knew exactly what to look for when managing the analysis of our system. We are now in a much better position to examine the causes our axle box bearing failures following the investigation carried out (to date) by  Romax,” he added.

Yann Rageul, Head of Sales Europe & Strategic Consulting Romax says: “At Romax we pride ourselves in our ability to not only provide world-leading specialist solutions, but also industry experts for our customers. This gives them access to the best service possible and we are glad to see that Irish Rail have been pleased with our services.”