Danobatgroup, a division of Corporación Mondragón, has been awarded contracts from well-known companies in the mining sector operating in Australia.

The first contact is to build a turnkey workshop to maintain and repair bogies and wheelsets of railway wagons. The second is an automated line for wheelset maintenance. In both cases the wagons are used for transportation between a mine and a port facility. Danobatgroup has also reached an accord with the Indian firm Ircon to supply an automated line for manufacturing passenger train wheelsets.

In total these three contracts are worth €103 million.

The projects in Australia are in response to the growing demand for automated workshops to maintain mining trains, located generally near the mine itself. Often these areas are difficult to access and skilled labor is not readily available. The workshops provide completely automated disassembly, repair, reassembly and final inspection of all components. These facilities are the most advanced in the world for maintenance of bogies and wheelsets, which are key components of a train. The two workshops will include 28 and 22 robotic handing devices, respectively, as well as a computer system to control the entire repair process.

In the past Danobatgroup has provided a bogie and wheelset manufacturing line to the Russian firm TVSZ. Afterward it built the world’s most advanced high speed train axle manufacturing line for Italy’s Lucchini SP.