Beginning of April, together with the TrackNet Group, we invited Swiss railway superstructure specialists to Unterwellenborn to discuss sustainability issues relating to railway superstructures. TrackNet is the market leader for the supply and maintenance of railway superstructure material in Switzerland. A total of 25 people accepted the invitation – including company representatives from the TrackNet Group (Tensol Rail, EFSA), SBB Swiss Federal Railways, KPZ-Fahrbahn AG, MOB, SZS Steel Construction Centre Switzerland, Hyperion GmbH Germany and other Swiss construction engineers.
They all share a passion for the railway. Our company is also strongly connected to this topic in many ways: on the one hand, rail is our preferred means of transport in logistics from an environmental and economic point of view: we transport a good two thirds of our finished products by rail, predominantly using CO2-neutral green logistics. We also supply sustainable constructions for European railway infrastructure projects exclusively using our CO2-reduced SWT Stahlwerk Thüringen Green Steel®. Furthermore, Stahlwerk Thüringen is the market leader for the production of steel sleepers in Central Europe.
The agenda included many presentations, the handover of the Green Steel certificate to the TrackNet Group, a tour of the plant and the unveiling and naming of a steel sleeper.
The handover of the Green Steel certificate by the management of Stahlwerk Thüringen GmbH to the director of the TrackNet Group was one of the highlights of the meeting. The certificate attests that all sleeper profiles delivered in 2023 were produced and shipped as low-emission SWT Stahlwerk Thüringen Green Steel with emissions of less than 330 kg CO2e per tonne of steel. The emissions saved in tonnes of CO2 are in the high four-digit range.
Another highlight was the unveiling and christening of the steel sleeper rolled according to customer specifications, which will be supplied with a roll relief “GREEN STEEL” with immediate effect:
Laurent Audergon, Managing Director of SZS Steel Construction Centre Switzerland, sees Switzerland as a pioneer for sustainable steel construction. ÖKOSTAHL and its own environmental product declaration have been established in Switzerland since 2010. In public tenders, the quality feature “emission content” must now be increasingly implemented as part of the sustainability assessment and defined as a standard in SBB tenders. This could be done via a bonus/penalty system: the lower the CO2e emissions of a construction, the higher the reward – while CO2e-intensive projects receive a penalty, which then makes them more expensive.
In a direct exchange with SBB, Dr Patrick Braess from TrackNet spoke about application projects for the steel sleepers developed by TrackNet and the optimisations the company has carried out. Until now, steel sleepers have been used on the railway network for between 35-40 years. With a newly developed fastening system, the product also has outstanding qualitative properties far beyond this, so that it should be possible to increase the service life to 75 years.
In the discussion that followed, representatives of SBB explained the importance of the sustainability strategy for their company. Mr Frenzel (Managing Director of Hyperion GmbH) reported on his experience as a developer of track construction material and track construction planner and pointed out the urgent need to implement sustainability criteria in railway construction projects in Germany.
It has become clear that it is worth taking a new approach and thinking through the entire process from material production to installation in the track in terms of sustainability in order to achieve optimum results in reducing CO2e emissions.
The new generation of engineers at manufacturers and users attach particular importance to initiatives that take sustainability, durability and the conservation of our resources into account. This is exactly what future generations expect from us.
Steel that carries European railways sustainably.
