Capabilities

ZF Services UK has been trading in Nottingham for over 40 years overhauling and repairing gearboxes and transmissions for rail, automotive, marine, defence and commercial vehicle markets. In 2003 a dedicated rail shop was created in order to service the growing number of ZF final drives requiring overhaul in the UK market.

ZF Services UK now overhauls circa 150 rail transmissions and 550 final drives per year for a growing list of customers in the UK, mainland Europe and as far afield as Thailand. This covers all sectors of the rail market including light rail, passenger and freight products.

In addition, ZF Services UK acts as the UK distributor for the ZF Group damper brand Sachs and can provide dampers for locomotives, freight wagon and passenger vehicle suspension.

Systems Solutions

Building on its experience in rail, ZF Services UK diversified its service offering to include the overhaul of wheelsets and bogies. This has included the successful completion of the overhaul of 212 powered wheelsets for Copenhagen Tram and heritage DMU wheelsets for Swanage railway.

Engineering Centre of Competence

ZF Services UK is recognised as the rail global centre of competence for reverse engineering of third-party gearboxes for the ZF Group. This allows them to overhaul and repair all brands of gearbox and, where required, create ZF approved reverse engineered parts manufactured to ZF Group’s high standards for quality and performance. ZF Services UK will also provide ongoing warranty and aftersales support for the whole life of the asset including; spares, product support and in-service health checks.

Innovation

ZF Group spends around £2bn per annum on research and development, allowing ZF Services UK to supply a wide range of innovative and highly specialised products. ZF Services UK can then use its own in-house engineering and design capability to manage turnkey projects to upgrade legacy assets.

Repowering

ZF’s repowering solutions aim to reduce fuel consumption and thus life cycle costs as well as at extending the service life of the rail vehicles. In the repowering process, outdated driveline technology is replaced by modern, efficiently working driveline components. ZF Services UK has enabled a number of successful repower (decarbonisation) projects for Irish Rail and more recently Porterbrook with HybridFlex.

Remote Condition Monitoring – connect@rail

connect@rail combines digital know-how and intelligent connectivity solutions for rail transport. With our innovative solutions, monitoring systems, and digital services, we support rail operators in permanent monitoring, early maintenance planning and predictive maintenance of their fleets. Our product offering includes Infrastructure-and-Driveline-Monitoring, which provides wheel and track monitoring and together with our technology partner Transmission Dynamics, Smart Oil Plug®, which enables holistic gearbox health monitoring.