Design and Engineering
Engineering works with TTX division shops, suppliers, and owner railroads to ensure cars are built and modified to customer requirements. They are responsible for many areas related to maintenance, building, and supply of TTX equipment including:
Responsibilities:
- Approving new car designs
- Designing maintenance and modification procedures
- Approving supplier parts and design changes
- Active members of AAR Committees
- Improving efficiency of maintenance and modification
- Testing and improving new designs and components
Engineering Design Tools:
- Solid Modeling/Drafting - Solidworks
- Finite Element Analysis - ANSYS
- Dynamic Modeling - NUCARS®
- Metrology - FARO Arm
- Brake Shoe Force Testing - Smart Shoe
- Instrumented Wheelsets
Large Scale Programs that have been developed by Engineering:
- Conversion of 48-ft intermodal spine railcars to 53-ft cars
- Design and conversion of railcars to carry automobile frames
- Conversion of 89-ft flat railcars to pipe service
- Design of Uni-level railcar
- Conversion of 89-ft flat railcars to wind turbine component service
- Conversion of caboose to mobile data logging center for instrumentation and testing
- Conversion of 48-ft intermodal doublestack railcars to carry 40-ft containers
The 48-ft to 40-ft conversion process is illustrated below:
Solid model of a TTX well railcar being converted from 48-ft to 40-ft to be utilized for transporting international containers.
The engineers at TTX create an FEA Model to verify the structure of the well car.
The team then reviews and interprets the results of the FiniteElement Analysis.
Next, detailed drawings are created for the modification.
Modification begins....
...and the final product is completed at a TTX division shop.