Lightweight Train Rerailer System

A rerailer system is used to guide train wheels, including 6 axel locomotives, back onto tracks after being derailed.

The Lightweight Rerailer System from Pennsy Corporation is a solution designed to address the challenges of maneuvering heavy rerailers that exceed OSHA’s and NIOSH’s recommended two-person lifting limits. The system features a pair of rerailers, each weighing less than 100 pounds, ensuring compliance with safety regulations while maintaining functionality and durability.

These products originate at Manitowoc Grey Iron Foundry in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The MGIF Team using CAD/CAM produced an aluminum tool called a pattern. Once polished and finished to remove machining marks the tool is mounted on a molding machine. There is a top and a bottom pattern called a cope and a drag. A container called a Flask is placed on each half. These halves are on separate molding machines. A clay bonded sand is poured into the flasks, compacted, and drawn off the pattern leaving a cavity in what is called a greensand mold.

The green sand mold (cope and drag) will be closed and have 2500-degree molten Iron combined with additional elements poured into it. It is used once, dumped, the sand is recycled into the system.

The casting is removed from the sand cleaned and shipped to a heat-treating facility. The heat treater’s, Alberts Surface Technologies in Oshkosh WI. will put the casting through a process called Austempering. This process will physically change the Iron to produce properties equivalent to steel.

Finally, the castings are sent to Classic Coating in Two Rivers, Wisconsin to be painted before sending out to Pennsy Corporation.