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Journalism of Courage
At the cavernous workshop of the Rail Wheel Factory (RWF) in Bengaluru’s Yelahanka, the roar of machinery and the hiss of burning furnaces force Neeraj Kumar to raise his voice to be heard. “At 1,600 degrees centigrade, the furnace is so hot it can melt anything within seconds. Of my eight-hour shift, I have to be here for three hours. No matter what you wear, the heat stings the face. These wheels are not easy to fabricate,” he says.
A resident of Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh, the 30-year-old factory assistant is among the 2,200 employees of the four-decade old wheel factory – a key cog in the Railways’ plan to increase its share of freight traffic from the current share of 27% to 45% by 2030. With freight traffic generating nearly 65% of the total revenue of the Indian Railways, any further ramp-up will involve more infrastructure, crucially wagons and wheels.
Of the current requirement of 3.30 lakh wheels for freight wagons, the factory in Bengaluru supplies close to 2 lakh wheels per year while over 60,000 wheels are manufactured at Bela Wheel Plant in Bihar, another production unit of the Railways. The remaining wheels are imported, mostly from China.
According to the 2019 National Rail Plan, prepared for a “future-ready” railway system, the Indian Railways has set ambitious targets. Besides increasing freight capacity from 1,600 million tonnes (MT) in 2024-25 to 3,000 MT by 2030, there are plans to raise the speed of freight trains to 100 km per hour from the current average speed of 25 kmph.
The factory in Bengaluru is a key part of that goal – here, a wheel is cast every two minutes, an axle is made every 4.5 minutes and a wheelset is assembled every four minutes.
With a codal or working life of around eight years, a single wheel typically weighs around 450-500 kg and has a diameter of 725 mm-1,100 mm.
Located nearly 20 km from Bengaluru, the RWF was set up in 1984. Its genesis lies in its policy of “self-sufficiency”. Since the 1960s, the Railways had been importing various types of wheels from the UK, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Romania, Japan, China, Ukraine and Russia. But with rising import costs draining foreign exchange reserves in the 1970s and the wheel inventory facing delays due to dependence on foreign suppliers, the Railways Board felt the need to set up its own unit, then named the Wheel and Axle Plant.
Towards the end of 1972, before the wheel factory was set up, a team was sent to Europe, the US and Canada to study equipment and processes. At present, RWF uses a patented process used by the US-based Griffin Wheel Company to cast its wheels. Besides this, the team also adopted Austrian company GFM’s method of forging axles using long forging machines.
“When the plant was set up, its production capacity was 56,700 wheels and 23,000 axles per annum. The current production capacity is 1.90 lakh wheels, 1.12 lakh axles and 1.25 lakh wheel sets per annum,” says Chief Mechanical Engineer (CME) Govind Pandey, adding that the RWF also exports wheels to the Mozambique railway.
In 2024-25, the factory manufactured 2,01,150 lakh wheels for freight operations — its highest ever — besides 93,880 axles and 98,630 wheelsets.
The RWF manufactures 17 types of wheels, 40 types of axles and nine types of wheelsets. Its products are used in BOXN wagons (a type of open gondola wagon designed to carry bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, etc.,), broad-gauge and metre-gauge coaches, electric multiple unit (EMUs), container wagons and locomotives.
The 191-acre factory floor is a hub of activity – red-hot steel wheels, fresh from the furnace, roll down the production line as a crane releases them. Arranged in a column in the hot wheel kiln section, their surfaces still radiate heat. Moved with precision, the overhead cranes position the component at designated locations. In between this controlled chaos, sparks fly as metal is cut, and the air is heavy with the smell of hot steel and machine oil.
As the crane starts moving the heavy ladles (a large cylindrical mould to shape the wheels) along the production line, everything else ceases to exist for Rakesh Yadav, an assistant at the Pouring Crane section of the production line.
Wearing a red helmet, cuffed gloves and a respirator, Yadav places a straw-like material into the openings on top of the ladles to ignite a fire. “This helps maintain the ladle’s heat, ensuring the casting is carried out at the required temperature,” he explains.
Deputy Chief Mechanical Engineer (Wheels) Sanjay Kumar says most manufacturing at the workshop is done on an automatic assembly line with minimum human intervention. And yet, he says, worker safety remains a priority to ensure there are no untoward incidents in the workshop. “Given the nature of work, which involves such high temperatures, many things are done only by machines,” he says.
Explaining the wheel manufacturing process at RWF, he says, “Scrap is dumped in the furnaces, followed by tapping (the process of pouring molten metal into a ladle). The molten steel is then transferred to a mould. Then we split the wheel and send it to another section for testing. All wheels are subjected to stringent quality control at all stages.”
At the testing workshop, the wheels undergo three tests for quality checks, said Kumar. “All wheels undergo three tests: magnetic particle testing (MPT), ultrasonic testing (UT) and the Brinell hardness test.”
While the magnetic particle test looks for surface defects, the UT tests the wheels for internal soundness and the Brinell test checks the hardness value of the rim.
“Wheels found defective are sent back to the furnace. Almost 7% of all wheels fail these tests and end up being sent back for re-casting,” says Elangovan, an Assistant Manager (Works) who has been with the factory for 32 years.
The RWF is one of the biggest recyclers for the Indian Railways — all the wheels at the factory are manufactured from scraped wheels and axles.
Besides defective wheels, says Chief Mechanical Engineer Govind Pandey, the factory receives nearly one lakh tonnes of scrap (condemned wheel discs, rails, axles, etc.,) generated by zonal railways and production units of the Railways.
“We do not buy raw materials for wheel manufacturing. We are one of the biggest recyclers for the Railways. The chemical and mechanical properties in the scrap wheels that the Railways gives us usually remain intact. The raw material for axles, billets (a solid block or bar of metal made from an alloy) is supplied mostly by SAIL (Steel Authority of India Limited),” he says.
