A short journey past the grey Berlin suburbs and through the forest that surrounds the Autobahn, the 65,000m2 train factory sprawls around the small town of Hennigsdorf supportively.
Hennigsdorf is Bombardier Transportation's largest train manufacturing site worldwide and employs around 2,600 people, 1,000 of which are engineers. Alongside 800 employees in operations they design, develop, manufacture and maintain high speed, regional and commuter trains, metro trains and light rail vehicles.
Bombardier took over the site in 2001, but trains have been developed and made at Hennigsdorf for the last 100 years. Today the factory uses the generations of experience present in its workforce to specialise in pre-series trains - the first trains of a larger order that the operator test runs on its network.
January 2016 also marks a big production changeover for Hennigsdorf’s main production hall, as it switches from the Talent 2 regional trains it has been making to the C30 metro trains for Stockholm, Sweden.
Hennigsdorf is large, but Ulrich Bultner, its general site manager, says the plan is for further growth: “We will continue to grow in size in the coming years. We have some very good projects that last a long time.”
The site is developing the ICx high speed train project in collaboration with Siemens, a project planned to last ten years. It is also making up to 148 trains for S-Bahn in Hamburg, an order that will also take it into the next decade.
Train manufacturers are under increasing pressure to innovate, not just against other forms of transportation, but also against itself. Competition is more aggressive and customers are in a better position than ever before to demand improvements that give a better passenger experience and more energy efficiency.
However Bultner sees no problem dealing with future technological developments, particularly around the increased connectivity and IT in trains: “We are the biggest site for engineering. We have all the experts we need for our business right here. We develop the trains for a lot of other projects worldwide and can secure the technology requirements of the future.”
Motor development
The type of expertise Bultner and Hennigsdorf depends upon exists, at places such as the site’s Propulsion Production and Control centre (PPC). The centre, which produces and tests AC motors and gearboxes for pre-series trains, is staffed by around 50 people and has up to 40 different development and servicing projects happening at any one time.
The Propulsion centre at Hennigsdorf
The key requirement at the PPC is flexibility. The large, modern, building therefore has a workshop feel instead of any perceivable manufacturing flow. There are collections of motors and gearboxes, each about the size of a car engine, at various stages of assembly positioned around the floor.
Typically, a medium motor takes around 150 hours to produce. Around two thirds of this time is spent winding the coil and the stator, a process conducted in China. This is then impregnated and inserted into the housing at Henningsdorf and the gearbox assembled before final assembly and testing.
Larger motors for high speed trains take up to 200 hours to produce because of the higher number of coils – 72 compared to the 48 to 54 found in smaller motors. The PPC also started producing permanent magnet motors three years ago. These take longer to produce because they are more complicated, with different insulation and aluminium cast casings.
Recent work has seen the PPC develop water resistant motor housings, to withstand the monsoon season in India. Another has been for high speed motors in trains destined for Saudi Arabia. These have to withstand high temperatures and sand blast from the desert, and will power trains at speeds of up to 350 kmph.
Remanufacturing
As new motors and gearboxes for trains are dispatched to far flung locations, old components come back to be overhauled, re-engineered and returned into service. The Component Re-engineering and Overhaul (CRO) building where this work is done is even more like a workshop than the Propulsion Production and Controls Centre. Business here is booming. In 2001 the department at Hennigsdorf handled 650 items. In 2015 this had increased to around 6000.
An employee overhauling an auxiliary converter
Sitting on workbenches and on crates are boxes of old electronics from places as diverse as New Jersey, Moscow and Malaysia. These old parts of trains are being resurrected, and often modernised with the latest technology inside the old boxes.
The CRO overhauls more power electronics then anything else: printed circuit boards, traction converters, battery charger modules, any kind of electromechanical component. The engineers and technicians here work on components produced as far back as the 1970s or replace them with the modern equivalent if the part is obsolete. The CRO also thoroughly tests under current, voltage, load and temperature the parts before they re-enter service.
Pre-series improvements
However, the production hall at Hennigsdorf where pre-series trains are assembled dwarfs both the propulsion centre and the CRO building. Pre-series trains are first assembled using a static “island” approach, until the assembly process can be streamlined enough to go to the main production hall. After testing on the customer’s network they are returned to Hennigsdorf for any modifications and changes.
The assembly area is divided into two, half is finishing an 138 strong order of Bombardier's latest Flexity trams destined for the streets of nearby Berlin, the other half electric trains for Hamburg’s S-Bahn.
The trams are built into five or seven car sets, 30 – 40m long, either one direction or bidirectional. At 2.4m wide the trams are wider than the current fleet and are also considerably quieter and more modern.
Finishing touches to one of the S-Bahn Hamburg trains in the assembly hall
Each of the two end cars are produced in five days, the five middle cars take two days each, so that every ten days an entire seven car train set is produced. After being built up from the middle the cars are moved sideways until they are placed onto the bogies into the final position at the end of the line, where they are also tested.
In contrast to the trams which are built to a flow, the Class 490 trains being produced for Hamburg are manufactured in a static cell, where the people move instead of the three car trains.
Jörg Mekas, manager of method at Bombardier Transportation's Hennigsdorf plant, says: “The tac time is slower here, but by improving the engineering, fitting information, supplier arrangements, testing and logistics sequencing we work out the best way of manufacturing. A ten day station is reduced to one day, a train that takes 40 days to make can be bought down to eight days.”
Another way that Bombardier is trying to improve both the assembly process and the trains themselves is by developing them using virtual reality. This month the factory begins producing metro trains for for Stockholm Sweden, although the trains have already been completely built and stripped down many times at Hennigsdorf’s VR centre using the IC.IDO virtual reality system.
Thomas Hinklehurst, chief technology officer for metros at Bombardier Transportation, says: “VR is a new feature to speed up the engineering process. Metros are victims of their own success. Customers want more and more capacity, because they are efficient and we are becoming more urbanised.”
“The reality is these trains are lasting longer, 35-40 years, and if we can reduce the time it takes to produce them it makes a massive difference to cost.”
Ulrich Bultner, Hennigsdorf’s general site manger says: “It’s very important to improve productivity, especially for the first train production. The interface between the engineering processes, preparing for production and the actual production is the most important time in any of our projects.
“Using the VR centre, it’s very helpful that employees from production see the train very early and prepare the production to be more efficient. And the customer can see the products early in the development process so their requirements can be met better.”
Train manufacturing at Hennigsdorf and train factories like it, are steeped in both the heritage and expertise built-up over several generations of workers. But making trains is distinct from other transport manufacturing operations. Unlike automotive manufacturing, making trains is lower volume, but slower because of the high level of customisation. In contrast to most aerospace manufacturing, train manufacturing lacks the kind of rigorous standardisation that aircraft have.
Competition in the sector is fierce, but by embracing new ways of working, like virtual reality and increased standardisation, and combining them with engineering expertise, train makers like Bombardier can continue to keep their product competitive and relevant.