Automated Rail Milling for Wangerooge Narrow-Gauge Railway

The island railway on Wangerooge, operated by Deutsche Bahn, is the company's last narrow-gauge line with a track gauge of 1,000 millimeters. The railway connects the harbor with the island village and performs essential transport tasks for around 200,000 passengers annually on the car-free island. The rails of the 3.4-kilometer route, which are around five decades old, showed significant signs of wear. Over the years, the formerly electrically welded 15-meter rails caused increasing noise emissions when trains drove over the welded joints. In addition, the island location, the Lower Saxon Wadden Sea National Park, and tidal dependencies required strict time and logistical limits for the maintenance measures.

Combination of milling truck and mobile processing system
The goal of the maintenance was to upgrade the infrastructure before planned renovations of local bridges, increase ride comfort, and extend the lifespan of the rails. For this task, the operator selected a combination of automated processing technologies from Vossloh. The core component was the SF02, a highly mobile road-rail milling truck that can be flexibly deployed on gauges from 1,000 to 1,520 millimeters. The machine removes material in a targeted manner and enables precise reprofiling of the rails, while an integrated grinding process ensures an acoustically optimized surface quality. For geometrically complex and hard-to-reach areas, such as switch frogs or the storm surge barrier, the manually and track-guided Flexis system was additionally used.




Nighttime deployment and noise reduction
Logistics required precise planning, as the transport of the machines by cargo ferry depended on the tides, and the work took place exclusively at night outside operating and bird breeding times. Vossloh employees moved around the car-free island using e-bikes. The milling truck was deployed for three night shifts, while the Flexis system processed special areas over six additional nights. Steffen Riedel, Technical Sales Manager at Vossloh, explained the project's demands: "On Wangerooge, you don't just plan with machines and personnel. Tide, weather, and nature conservation are just as much a part of the construction process". The automated processing almost completely eliminated the disturbing noise emissions from the welded joints, allowing the trains to operate much more quietly and ensuring sustainable rehabilitation of the rail infrastructure.

Edited by Maria Brueva, Induportals editor – adapted by AI.

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