what’s working: sustainability
Helping CAT® Excavators Ride the Rails
HPF Manufacturing, Inc. has created an innovative way to cut fuel
use by 97 percent for railroad work and maintenance.
employer: HPF Manufacturing, Inc.
location: Snohomish
number of employees: 18
product:
This Snohomish County employer designs and manufactures Rail-X® undercarriages. These Rail-X®
undercarriages are then integrated with CAT®-style excavators to run along rails. Instead of trucking big crews and big
equipment to work sites or rail transfer locations — a fuel-intensive proposition — a single Rail-X® machine can glide along
the rails without locomotives, doing the work with dramatically lower carbon emissions.
innovative environmental stewardship: HPF designs Rail-X® undercarriages to maximize fuel efficiency
by incorporating drive motors so that an excavator can be driven on rail to a work site by a single operator. The average fuel
consumption is just 5 gallons per hour. In contrast, the traditional process for rail maintenance involves the following: An
excavator is trucked to a rail site, hoisted and bolted onto a rail car, then pulled by locomotive to the work site. The average
fuel consumption is 175-200 gallons per hour.
Using Rail-X® excavators significantly cuts fuel consumption by up to 97 percent when compared to the traditional process
of railroad maintenance, thus reducing the carbon footprint within the rail industry for a more sustainable and green
environment.
This innovation earned HPF Ma