840,000 km on a single oil fill in a rail gearbox. 🚅
Berlin was calling, and HCP Sense answered at InnoTrans 2026!
The big question: How many oil changes are still being carried out simply out of habit? ⁉️
💡 From AI and Digital Automatic Coupling to battery-powered trains, digitalization was a major focus in Berlin. One topic kept coming up, right through to the opening panel featuring major manufacturers: maintenance needs to identify problems before they lead to failures.
That was exactly the focus of the joint presentation by Voith Group and Klüber Lubrication:
⚙️ Four years of field testing with eurobahn and Alpha Trains on Stadler FLIRT trains, covering 24 Voith SZH595 rail gearboxes.
🛢️ Fully synthetic gear oil: stable oil quality, no oil-related damage, and no critical ageing.
📈 Extended oil change intervals from 250,000 km to as much as 600,000 km, with a peak of 840,000 km.
✅ Less workshop time, greater vehicle availability, and lower resource consumption.
What I find particularly interesting is how this approval was achieved: through regular oil analyses based on samples.
The next step would be to measure the lubricant condition directly inside the bearing in real time. This would make it possible to determine maintenance intervals individually for each gearbox based on its actual condition, rather than applying a fixed interval across the entire fleet.
I happen to know a young company from Darmstadt that could help make this possible. 😉
A big thank you to Pierre Köplin for bringing the presentation to my attention and for accompanying me at the event! 🙌
How do you determine your maintenance intervals today – by mileage, oil analysis, or actual condition?
