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FRICTION MANAGEMENT

Railway Age – July 2020 Issue – Tech Focus MOW on Friction Management – Roll Safe, Roll Silent
Gary Mehalic, Manager Friction Management Operations

Loram Friction Management was given an opportunity to provide content for the above-mentioned article. The full
article can be found at the following link:
https://www.railwayage.com/mw/roll-safe-roll-silent/?RAchannel=mw

Following is the full series of questions and my answers that were incorporated in the article.

What kind of friction management and lubrication services does Loram offer?
We have a full line of wayside application equipment for gauge face and
top of rail, the consumables, and we also have the service to go with it.
In some cases, the customers do all their own maintenance of equip-
ment, in other cases we do it on a contract basis for them, and then
there’s everything in between.

Each Class I has their own strategy for how they conduct their friction
management program, and we can fine-tune what we offer based on
what they need. Because there's no one strategy—it seems like they all
have variations of what they do.

We look at friction management as a three- or four-legged stool.
You've got the equipment; you've got the consumables and you've got the maintenance or service component. And in
Loram’s case, we have the fourth leg of the stool with rail grinding. Friction management and rail grinding tend to go
together. Optimizing both allows you to extend rail life and track life in general, and gain fuel savings and all the bene-
fits of train handling dynamics we talk about. So, a three-legged stool is stable, but a four-legged stool is that much
more stable. But if you lose one of the legs of that stool, the stool falls over.

So, who are some of Loram’s clients?
It’s virtually any railroad that has steel wheels and steel rails. We sell to all the Class I’s in North America, a lot of the
regional short lines and transits. We have operations in Australia and Brazil and Europe, so we're global. Our custom-
er basis is worldwide.
Now, how has friction management and lubrication evolved over the years?

Gauge face lubrication has been around virtually since railroads first began operating. Initially, before there was any
kind of automated equipment to lubricate the track, it was done manually—literally with a pail and a brush. They
would go out and apply grease mainly to the curves.

As the art evolved, there became automated systems for applying curve lubricant. They had mechanical-type lubrica-
tors that—as the train ran over the wheel—literally pressed either a ramp lever or a hydraulic-type plunger to pump
grease out onto the track.

Back in those days—up until, really, the mid- ‘90s—the only friction management that was applied was gauge face
grease or curve lubricant. It's only been in the last 20 years that top-of-rail friction modification became another strat-

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