Go Ahead. Just Try to Impress the NYC MTA Crew!

It’s not easy to get a NYC MTA repair crew excited. Happy-excited at least. Unhappy-excited is a bit easier. But when a two-day, two-man job becomes a one-hour, one-man job – with improved results, even the most jaded yard mechanic’s blood starts racing. That’s what happened this May 2022 when Boschert USA installed a new Stierli-Bieger 1300 CNC Rail Bending machine in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Brooklyn repair facility. Over its more than 100-year history, MTA repairs has had some challenging tasks thrown at them. As the largest public transportation network in North America, with 665 miles of track supporting 6,684 subway cars on 36 lines across Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, MTA handles 1.3 billion rides in a year, 5.15 million on an average weekday. That’s a lot of cranky New Yorkers when any line goes down for any reason at virtually any time. Throw challenging and extreme weather conditions and an aging infrastructure into the mix and it is a recipe for stressful responses to breakdowns. That’s where the Stierli 1300 with 150 tons of working power came in so handy – replacing equipment and bending procedures that were literally 100 years old. During its initial training process, the MTA crew put the machine up against some of its toughest frog bends with their triple kinks – precisely matching the bends from the original rail pulled out of active tracks. This kind of exacting precision is difficult to accomplish. But with the Stierli’ s CNC controls, even on their test run the crew was able to pull it off on the first try. The Stierli bending machine is doing so well, Boschert USA already has drawings and orders for additional tooling to meet the MTA’s varied rail bending needs.

Published on Jun 29, 2022