Hyundai Rotem leads manufacture of next-generation railway

CHANGWON, South Gyeongsang Province – Engineers at Hyundai Rotem Co.'s rolling stock factory in South Korea have their hands full manufacturing trains for export, as the company pushes to expand its presence in the global market.

The South Korean railway system maker under Hyundai Motor Group produces all products — including bullet trains, trams and subways — at the plant in Changwon, some 370 kilometers (230 miles) southeast of Seoul. Products are currently shipped to 38 countries.

Hyundai Rotem plans to manufacture the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell tram at the facility.

“We won a deal to export bullet trains after learning the technology from France 30 years ago,” said Park Sung-boo, Hyundai Rotem rolling stock factory vice president, during a visit to the site by The Korea Economic Daily earlier this month. “We are doing our best to commercialize the world’s first hydrogen-powered tram.”

In 1994, the company signed a technology transfer deal with Alstom SA, a French rolling stock manufacturer, to set up the bullet train system in Korea.

KOREA’S FIRST BULLET TRAIN EXPORT

Hyundai Rotem last month scored a 270 billion won ($196 million) deal to sell high-speed trains to Uzbekistan, marking Korea’s first export of such railway vehicles.

The Uzbekistan deal is expected to ramp up the global expansion of the company, founded by the late Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung in 1977, Park said.

“That export provided us with a bridgehead to speed up growth in the world market,” he stressed.

Hyundai Rotem is the world’s eighth-largest player in the global rolling stock industry, with a global market share of 2%. China’s state-owned CRRC Corp. dominates the market with a 24.8% share, followed by France's Alstom with 15.4% and Germany’s Siemens AG with 7.9%.

DISTRIBUTED-POWER ROLLING STOCK

Engineers welded bodies of the EMU-260, a distributed-power express train with a maximum speed of 260 km/hour, creating sparks at the 630,000 square meter (6.8 million square feet) plant. Most work is done manually by the world-class engineers.

A distributed-power rolling stock disperses the tractive effort to pull the train to multiple units. This kind of train performs better in terms of speed, performance, transport capacity and safety than a concentrated-power rolling stock equipped with one power car known as a locomotive, which pulls the entire train.

Hyundai Rotem has produced a line of distributed-power rolling stock models as it's been developing such trains since 2007.

“Countless trials over the years have finally paid off with an export deal,” said Kim Mi-jeong, the company’s senior manager.

“Our technology was well received with the first release of the distributed-power high-speed train KTX-Eum in 2019, resulting in its export to Uzbekistan,” Kim said, referring to the EMU-260 for Korea.

Each body line contains certificates of each country, as welders must be qualified by the standards of the importer. Engineers weld train bodies mounted on rotating machines that can turn the structures 360 degrees.

The plant uses robots to manufacture train roofs by combining five aluminum pieces, the only automated process.

Afterward, vehicles undergo the painting process and move to an assembly line that installs insulation, flooring, cabs and other equipment. It takes about 10 months to complete a train. Finally, Hyundai Rotem tests new trains on a 3 km railroad track. 


Write to Jung-Eun Shin at newyearis@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.