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Feature Story

The Story of RGT’s Origins

By Nicholas Karjalahti, Manager, Rail Grinding

Last month Brad told us the end of life story of one of the oldest machines in the fleet, RG15. I thought I should con-
tinue with his theme and tell you about one of the newest machines, the RGTs. This is my first time writing a Field
News article, or now a Track N’ Times article. Some of you may know me, many don’t. I have spent most of my
Loram career down in the caves of Engineering, specifically working for David Huebner in the R&D group. I was
lucky in that I got to work with the newest technology and be on teams inventing some of the newest things for Lo-
ram, the last was the RGTs.

Today we have 3, RGT01, RGT02, and now RGT03. When we started the ideation phase, we had no idea it was go-
ing to be a semi-truck. In fact, back in 2001 when gas was $1.42 per gallon, one of the first stabs at this concept was
the Brandt Truck with a 4 stone cart. We learned a lot from that set-up, some good things and some bad, namely
weight distribution. Some of our first ideas for the RGT were ultra-compact concepts like a pickup pulling a buggy.
We had all sorts of names for this machine, mobile rail reprofiler, TRG, Truckable, Trukkie, settling on Rail Grinder
Truckable, RGT. A lot more front-end work went into these machines than most people know. Simple things like
names to more complex things like market studies, weight distribution, frame sizing, curve and grade capabilities, and
clearances all had to be decided on.

As these ideas progressed, marketing found a customer willing to not only let us test this new concept but also if we
could meet their delivery date would put RGT into service right away. It was a very short timeline something close
to 8 months and a very demanding customer, pretty much par for the course for Loram. With endless variable op-
tions we needed to start locking down performance of this machine. How fast should we grind? How fast do we
need to get on and off track? How much power do we need? How can we do this quickly? All the different wants
and asks quickly pointed us to a class 8 tractor, due merely to weight concerns; buggy, power units, fuel, water, hy-
draulics, and the future potential of dust all are very heavy objects that a standard pickup, F-6000, or single axle beer
truck was not going to be able to pull. The decision was made to go for a semi sized machine.

RGT01’s build was the first prototype. With prototype machines you are going to find things that work very well
and a lot more things that don’t. Due to our shortened timeline we were constantly battling lead time, design time,
cost and weight. RGT01 will be forever distinguished as the original. It has an RGM full flex buggy (mid-sized grinder

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