Maintenance

Use our extensive maintenance network

As owner, keeper and Entity in Charge of Maintenance (ECM), it is our duty and responsibility to ensure our fleet is well maintained. Our maintenance scheduling team is comprised of all disciplines from sales to project managers and engineers, each weighing in and bringing a different angle to an overall, highly sophisticated balancing act that constitutes our railcar maintenance plan. When we establish our maintenance plan, we know which wagons are due for revision and match them to one of our 40+ certified maintenance workshops.

The most common maintenance activities are:

Tank Tests
Wheelset Repairs
Underframe Revisions
Car Painting
Inside Linings Renewal

Here is the magnitude of our maintenance service in numbers:

We execute more than 6.000 planned revisions per year

We handle an assortment of more than 800 spare parts required for the production of new railcars and maintenance of our existing fleet.

In addition to planned revisions, we also perform18.000 enroute repairs plus 20.000 wheelset repairs every year.

Keeping fall-out rates to a minimum

Our fleet is one of the youngest on the European market, a fact that plays in our favor when it comes to maintenance. Yet, we are committed to continuing to reduce fall-out rates to a minimum, here are some of the steps we are taking:

Growing our 40+ Workshop Network

We are actively screening, auditing and training workshops around Europe to grow our network. Quality assurance remains key during this process and we have an experienced team that is focused on just that.

Matching revisions to workshop expertise

We keep close track of workshop performance, schedules and expertise and match upcoming revisions accordingly.

Pre-Maintenance Prep Work

Each shop gets a detailed briefing before your railcar arrives. We also support in pre-scheduled cleaning and we pre-order spare parts so everything is ready when your railcar gets to the shop.

In-house Maintenance

We have our own in-house workshops in Ostroda & Plock, Poland that handles 2.000 railcar revisions and 8.000 planned wheelset repairs per year. These facilities provide us with a certain degree of flexibility in scheduling.

Downtime Optimization
Projects

We have various projects underway to improve throughput of railcar revisions. It is a bilateral effort to reduce downtime to a minimum.

Maintenance Shop Auditing

Our GATX audit team travels to certified shops to keep the high bar we have set for quality assurance. Shops in our network receive continuous training and support from this dedicated GATX team.

Online Maintenance Shop Portal

We are digitalizing our in-house maintenance with the shop portal. It allows us to reduce paper documentation flow as well as electronically exchange technical & operational data with our workshops.

Substituting Railcars

If we can’t find any other way, this is our last resort to provide our customers with an equivalent railcar.

In-house Workshops at Ostroda and Plock, Poland

A lot of our expertise on quality maintenance is bolstered by the experiences we garner at our wholly-owned shop in Ostroda and Plock. Ostroda employs 250 blue-collar employees, 110 office employees and undertakes 2.000 railcar revisions and 8.000 planned wheelset repairs per year. Our shop is an integral part of our GATX locations, and the work carried out on-site includes:

Refurbishment of railcar components
Revision of wheelsets
Assembly of new railcars
Railcar Painting

Everything we learn at Ostroda, we carry to our maintenance shop network across Europe. Have a look at our Maintenance Network to see the locations of the certified maintenance shops or subscribe to our GATX newsletter to stay informed.

Send cleaned Railcars to Maintenance Shops

Finally, we do have an expert tip for you: An easy way to reduce workshop downtime… send your railcars off cleaned. Not everyone remembers to do it, but it makes a big difference – especially for workshops that do not have cleaning facilities on site. Together, we’ll be even more efficient.