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Industry | Railway vehicle components |
---|---|
Founded | 1941 |
Founder | Jan Dellner |
Headquarters | Vika, Sweden |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Fredric Håkansson (CEO), Klaus Deller (Chairman of the Board) [1] |
Products | Couplers, dampers, gangways |
Services | Aftermarket services and support for train connection systems [2] |
Owner | EQT AB |
Website | www |
Dellner Couplers AB is a Swedish original equipment manufacturer of train connection systems such as couplers, gangway systems and dampers. The headquarter of the company is in Vika in the Falun Municipality. Dellner is owned by the investment organisation EQT AB and has 19 subsidiaries worldwide, with around 1,100 employees. In 2018, the company generated annual sales of around SEK 1.9 billion (EUR 180 million). [3]
Dellner was founded in 1941 by the Swedish engineer Jan Dellner. [4] The first customer was Swedish State Railways, for whom the Engineering Bureau Dellner produced automatic couplers. In the following years, the company, based in the small town of Vika in central Sweden, expanded its business and supplied automatic couplers to numerous customers in Europe, such as the Paris Metro, SNCF, Rome Metro and Italian State Railways. [5]
In 1960, Dellner changed its corporate strategy and focused solely on the Scandinavian and North American markets. In the following years, the company expanded into automatic couplers under the name AB Dellner Malmco in Scandinavia. At the same time, a subsidiary was established in North America. At the beginning of the 1980s, the company had around 90 employees working at its Swedish headquarters in Vika and in subsidiaries in the USA and Canada.
A turning point in Dellner's corporate history came in 1983, when the company realigned its business strategy to supply train manufacturers and railway operators around the world with automatic train couplers. That decision marked the beginning of Dellner's gradual expansion as a global supplier of train coupling systems.
In recent years, the company has responded to the changing requirements of the rail industry. All over the world, increasing numbers of passenger trains have been developed which travel at ever higher speeds. That trend has made the safety of train couplings increasingly important. Dellner responded to that development in the railroad industry by considering the coupling of a train as a safety-relevant component of the entire train system. The former supplier of train couplings became a manufacturer of integrated coupling systems that have been equipped with numerous safety features over the years:
Dellner's coupling business in Sweden has traded under various names over the years. In 1952, the Engineering Bureau Dellner was renamed Runnvika Mechanical Workshop. Later, the coupling business traded under the legal names Jan Dellner & Co, AB Dellner Malmco and finally as Dellner Couplers AB. In 1992, Dellner Invest AB was founded as an umbrella company for Dellner Couplers. [6]
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic opening of Eastern Europe, Dellner expanded into the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. After 1997, Poland became an important location for Dellner, with a branch in Gdynia at which an increasing amount of production capacity was created in subsequent years.
In 2003, the holding company Dellner Invest acquired a Swedish company called Precima, a specialist in dampers and buffers for trains and other industrial applications. The Precima business was integrated into a newly founded subsidiary called Dellner Dampers, which formed a new business unit of Dellner Invest. [7]
In 2009, Dellner Invest acquired a British gangway systems manufacturer called Woodville, and created a new business unit of Dellner Invest called Dellner Woodville. [8]
Until 2019, Dellner Couplers and Dellner Dampers were both part of the holding company Dellner Invest, which also included the companies Dellner Brakes, Dellner Woodville and Pintsch Bubenzer (50 percent). [9]
In June 2019, the Swedish private equity firm EQT acquired Dellner Couplers AB, together with its global subsidiaries including Dellner Dampers AB from Dellner Invest. [10] These two companies now operate under the Dellner Couplers brand.
Since then, the remaining companies of the parent holding company Dellner Invest (as well as some newly created companies) have been operating under the umbrella of the newly founded Dellner Group. [11]
Dellner Couplers and Dellner Group are two entirely separate companies. Whereas Dellner Couplers is focused on providing train connection systems, Dellner Group is focused on delivering breaks, hydraulics, polymers and glass for various industries and the transportation sector.
In early 2021, Dellner acquired the couplers business of CAF MiiRA, a subsidiary of the Spanish train and bus producer Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles. [12]
Dellner Couplers AB has been based in Vika, Sweden, since the company was founded in 1941. The international management team including CEO Fredric Håkansson, CFO Thomas Leander and COO Stephan Weng as well as many global business units such as Sales, HR, Dellner Service, R&D, Finance, Quality or Procurement are located here. [13] Dellner has production and service facilities in India, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, China, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the USA. [14]
The main subsidiaries of Dellner Couplers are:
Since its foundation in 1997, Dellner Poland has developed as the largest production facility for automatic couplers within the Dellner companies. Dellner employs around 370 people locally at its plant in Miszewko near the port city of Gdynia. In addition to the production and final assembly of couplers, Poland also serves as Dellner's distribution center for various Eastern and Southern European countries. [15]
Dellner is represented in India by a total of 170 employees at two locations: a service center for couplers and gangways is located in Noida in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and Dellner has a production facility for gangways and couplers in Mevalurkuppam near the southern Indian port city of Chennai. [16]
A further production facility is located in Swadlincote in South Derbyshire, England, where around 165 employees work on the development and production of gangways for the international market. In addition, the site is also responsible for the overhaul of couplers and gangways for the UK market. [17]
Dellner has been active in the USA since the 1960s. Since 2012, the company has been operating under the name Dellner Inc. with two locations in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Roseville, California, with over 40 employees. Dellner USA offers sales and service activities for rail customers in North America. [18]
In China, Dellner has around 90 employees at its two locations in Shanghai and Wuhan. Dellner China's customer is the Chinese state-owned CRRC Group, for whom Dellner provides new couplers on the Chinese domestic market and the CRRC overseas markets as well as operators and maintainers in several cities, for whom Dellner delivers services for train connection systems. [19]
Dellner Dampers AB specialises in customised dampers and is based in the small town of Flen in Södermanland County, Sweden. [20]
Dellner has a long tradition of researching and developing technologies related to couplers and, later, complete train connection systems. From the beginning, the company began adapting types of train couplers to the requirements of different passenger trains. [21]
Today, Dellner manufactures all commercially available couplers for passenger trains [22] – from semi-permanent couplers to fully automatic couplers based on the Scharfenberg coupler principle, Tomlinson couplers and SA3 couplers. Dellner has also developed its own type of coupler head, the automatic coupler type 12. [23]
Dellner has also made a name for itself with the modular design of train couplers, and the development of a crash energy management system for passenger trains. [24]
Dellner has been a member of the Shift2Rail initiative and the European Union's DAC Delivery Program for the development of a digital automatic coupler for freight trains since 2020. [25] The European Union's DAC Delivery Program has set itself the objective of modernising and standardising the couplers used in freight train fleets across the EU to make the coupling of freight trains safer and faster. To this end, all 400,000–450,000 freight wagons in Europe are to be equipped with fully automatic couplers in the coming years. [26]
As part of that program, Dellner developed a digital automatic coupler in accordance with the DAC-4 standard, as well as a hybrid coupler for locomotives that can be used to simply convert old freight train fleets to the new technology. [27] As a member of the European Union's DAC Delivery Program, Dellner is also working on the development of a digital coupler according to the DAC-5 standard. [28]
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A coupling or coupler is a mechanism, typically located at each end of a rail vehicle, that connects them together to form a train. The equipment that connects the couplers to the vehicles is the draft gear or draw gear, which must absorb the stresses of the coupling and the acceleration of the train.
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A buffer is a part of the buffers and chain coupler system used on the railway systems of many countries, among them most of those in Europe, for attaching railway vehicles together.
Type H Tightlock couplers are a variety of Janney coupler, typically used on North American mainline passenger rail cars. They have mechanical features that reduce slack in normal operation and prevent telescoping in derailments, yet remain compatible with other Janney types used by North American freight railroads.
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The railcar couplers or couplings listed, described, and depicted below are used worldwide on legacy and modern railways. Compatible and similar designs are frequently referred to using widely differing make, brand, regional or nick names, which can make describing standard or typical designs confusing. Dimensions and ratings noted in these articles are usually of nominal or typical components and systems, though standards and practices also vary widely with railway, region, and era. Transition between incompatible coupler types may be accomplished using dual couplings, a coupling adapter or a barrier wagon.
A barrier vehicle (BV), barrier wagon, match wagon or translator coach is used to convert between non-matching railway coupler types. This allows locomotives to pull railway vehicles or parts of a train with a different type of coupler. A match wagon has an identical dual coupling at both ends.
Knuckle couplers are a semi-automatic form of railway coupling that allow rail cars and locomotives to be securely linked together without rail workers having to get between the vehicles.
From time to time, a railway decides that it needs to upgrade its coupling system from one that is proving unsatisfactory, to another that meets future requirements. This can be done gradually, which can create many problems with transitional incompatibilities, or overnight, which requires much planning.
Buffers and chain couplers – also known as "buffers and screw", "screw", and "screwlink" – are the de facto International Union of Railways (UIC) standard railway coupling used in the EU and UK, and on some railways in other parts of the world, such as in South America and India, on older rolling stock. Buffers and chain couplers are an assembly of several devices: buffers, hooks and links, or turnbuckle screws.
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Digital Automatic Coupling (DAC) is an advanced coupling system designed for the automatic connection of freight wagons. Unlike traditional screw couplings, the DAC system enables automatic mechanical coupling as well as electrical and data connections between train cars.