PCS Rail in the Field:
E-Talent for ÖBB Austrian Railways.
The E-Talent ÖBB represents a four-unit EMU on the basis of the Talent family of trains, re-engineered for the use of the overhead traction wire of the Austrian railway ÖBB as well as that of the adjacent German and Swiss railway systems. The innovative regional and mass transit vehicles were developed as modules and offer advanced passenger comfort: In 2001, PCS was commissioned to provide the equipment for the E-Talent ÖBB series. This included the AU 1450 on-board power supply, battery containers, control boxes, fuse boxes, and compartments for the window heating.
Initially, the development of the on-board power supply presented difficulties. For instance, the container initially designed had to be split in two. Designing the input filter and extracting the heat loss posed genuine engineering challenges. Add to this the need to comply with EMC ratings. A prototype was set up to conduct all necessary tests and to make all the required changes.
In 2002, the equipment successfully passed the type testing, and in November of the same year the first two equipments were delivered to the Bombardier plant in Aachen, right on schedule. In the month following, requests for improvements were successfully processed along the lines of our change management. A special team identified cost-cutting opportunities by making technical changes and using less costly materials.
When serial production started in mid-2003, it turned out that the welding assemblies outsourced to Poland were not completed on schedule. Moreover, the quality failed to meet our expectations. Worse yet, the manufacturing capacity was unavailable at the very time that the customer sought to reschedule deadlines for early delivery.
In order to meet the customer requests, to get on top of the quality issue, and to catch up on the production lag, a special team was put together for the E-Talent ÖBB equipment. This team manufactures all components for the E-Talent ÖBB equipment in its own responsibility. The team managed both to eliminate the production lag and to sustainably improve the quality.
Equipment components and software were optimised in close cooperation with Bombardier Transportation in Aachen and the syndicate partner in order to ensure reliable functionality of the equipment for end customer ÖBB and to use advanced diagnostics to secure a high availability.
By the end of the project in October 2008, a total number of 198 equipment sets had been delivered. 188 trains are in active service with ÖBB in Austria. Another ten equipment sets were installed in vehicles of MAV Hungarian railways.
From the perspective of the project management, the project owes its success to the commitment of the entire team, from engineering to shipping, but most of all to that of the production team and its essential contribution to the positive project conclusion.