TORU Rail plays critical role in cross-border brake tests in Haparanda
The need for railway workshops in Sweden is enormous. So much so that some train repairs and rebuilding are now being done in Finland, where workshops have more available capacity. The gauge is different in Finland, and one solution for transportation across the border is to temporarily replace the bogies of the wagons, after which the brakes need to be tested before the wagons are put back into service. TORU Rail is an indispensable part of making the process run smoothly. Euromaint has just carried out the latest brake test with the TORU Pro product in Haparanda for SJ, and we meet Frank Edgar at SJ and Thord Rutqvist at Euromaint who tell us more about both challenges and solutions.
Swedish industry and railways is developing both at a high pace and on a large scale, while Finnish workshops have lost access to the Russian market. This means that some maintenance work and rebuilding of Swedish trains and locomotives is now taking place in Finland.
In September 2025, the rebuilding of two SJ carriages was completed in one of the Finnish workshops. Finnish broad gauge bogies were used for transport in Finland, so before the carriages could be put into service in Sweden, the Finnish bogies needed to be replaced with SJ's original standard gauge bogies. This means that brake systems also need to be tested and approved before the carriages can roll again, and this is where the TORU Pro Field product saves a lot of time and money:
- TORU Pro is an incredibly important part of the process. Without TORU, the tests would have had to be carried out manually, which is theoretically possible but slow and difficult, both because the carriage has to be driven to a workshop and because it involves a lot of paperwork. Instead, a car equipped with TORU Pro arrives from the workshop for on-site testing. The tool is connected to a cloud database, so that all test results are instantly sent to the workshop in Luleå, and they can immediately produce protocols and maintenance certificates, explains Frank Edgar, vehicle engineer at SJ.
TORU Pro Field is a smaller, portable version of TORU Pro Workshop, a test tool for brake systems. Both products are digital and cloud-based, and several train service providers, including SJ, have made it a requirement for their maintenance work that TORU Pro must be used for testing and approval.
- This is a product that has been developed over a long period of time in collaboration with both end customers and workshops, and is truly tailored to their needs. The basic idea is that it’s all digital measurements which are saved directly to the cloud. This makes it both simple and mandatory to carry out all required measurements and save the results correctly, there’s no way to bypass tests or mistype measurements. It saves a lot of time, both in preventing errors and in being able to track where something went wrong, says Thord Rutqvist at Euromaint.
This is the fifth time this kind of test has been carried out by SJ in Haparanda in this series of renocations, and the result was again a success, despite flooding in the region affecting the timetable. A third carriage that was supposed to take part never arrived, and the schedule was gradually pushed ahead. But since the tests themselves went quickly, everything was still finished on time.
If we hadn't had TORU Pro and the associated car with its own compressor, we would have had to connect an external locomotive to pressure test for leaks in the brake systems, and what if the locomotive itself had its own leaks? We now avoid that problem. The test data then goes directly into the system and on to the workshop in Luleå. This means that the time until we have a maintenance certificate and then a certificate for return to traffic is very short. And that’s perhaps the most important saving, Frank concludes.
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