november 2011 | the rail engineer | 51
feature
Scunthorpe has been able to roll 108 metre lengths for some time. However, Hayange was limited to 80 metres maximum. SNCF (French Railways) wished to move to 108 metre lengths, and an order worth €350 million over 4 years gave Tata the confidence to invest in new plant. Moving from 80 to 108 metres takes up quite a bit of extra space. The finishing mill has to be 28 metres longer, the cooling racks have to be 28 metres longer, the straightening mill has to be 28 metres longer, and so do the storage bins. Even the part finished blooms emerging from the cogging mill are 15 metres longer. It all adds up.
Upheaval Planning started in September 2009. At the end of the finishing mill was a large ‘extension’ to the main building, mainly containing electrical plant. Over the next 18 months that was all cleared out and new wings added to make it the same width as the rest of the shop. Internally, everything was repositioned and reworked - even the cranes had to be able to handle weights 25% higher. 400 people at the peak of the work moved 7,000m³ of rubble from the site, and poured 4,200m³ of new concrete. 300 km of cable were needed in total for all the rewiring. All without stopping production. The revised mill started rolling on 27 June 2011 and, after a few tests to produce the familiar 80m lengths, the first 108 metre rail was produced two days later. By the start of July, the first trainload of new 108 metre rails was despatched to SNCF and was welded ready for track-laying at its plant in Saulon the following week. Further deliveries have already been made to France, Luxembourg and Austria, and Belgium has taken a batch of 100 metre rails.
Excellent result Plant manager Paul Hodgson is English, while coincidentally the plant manager of Scunthorpe is French! He was pleased with the final result. “I have to admit that when the first snow of last winter arrived earlier than normal in December, with much civils work still to do, the objective did at times appear hard to achieve. We had to resort to Plan B, Plan C and
sometimes Plan D in order to keep to the timeline. However, after a difficult start, the winter from January onwards was kinder than most Lorraine winters can be, and from around mid-March I ceased to consult the Meteo France weather-forecasting website two or three times per day! Our project team has accomplished a spectacular mission and I’d also like to thank all the other employees for adapting their work patterns which was extremely important for the success of the project.” All the hard work has already borne fruit. As well as supplying the SNCF renewals programme which started the whole exercise, Tata Steel has recently secured a major order to supply railway lines for a new high-speed track between the French cities of Bordeaux and Tours. The 430 employees at Hayange will manufacture 84,000 tonnes of high quality rail for the new 302km (188 miles) TGV South-EuropeAtlantique route for delivery from 2014. The company will also supply switches and crossings to the construction consortium COSEA. The total value of the steel supplied will be around €80 million (about £70m). Without the confidence of Tata’s management to invest in the new plant, this order would have gone elsewhere. As it is, there is a bright future for this steel mill at least, one of the survivors of Lorraine’s “rust valley”.
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