Rail Car Manufacturing: From Rivets to ABB Welding Robots

Rail car manufacturing from wooden carriages and riveted steel to shotwelded stainless and robot welded aluminium shells, and where ABB welding robots fit next.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/4/20265 min read

A passenger rail car is one of the largest welded objects a factory ever turns out: a long body shell that has to carry people for decades, sitting on two heavy bogies. This post follows rail car manufacturing from wooden carriages built by hand, through riveted steel and shot welded stainless steel, to the aluminium car bodies that robots weld today. It looks at the September 2026 news from Alstom's car body plant in Quebec, where robotic welding cells are now a research subject, and at where ABB welding robots fit as rail builders automate more of the shell and bogie work.

Large bright factory hall with yellow overhead cranes and train cars on assembly tracks

Inside Hitachi's train factory at Newton Aycliffe, England, during an open day in 2025. Photo: DS Pugh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From wooden carriages to welded stainless steel

Until about the end of the 19th century, most passenger cars were built of wood. Car works such as Pullman's in Illinois relied on carpenters and other tradesmen, and each car was put together largely by hand on its own frame. Wood was easy to shape, but it splintered in a crash and burned in a fire. In the early 1900s some railroads went through a halfway stage and put steel underframes beneath wooden bodies before all steel bodies took over.

Old photo of a crowd of men in hats walking out through the gates of a brick factory

Workers leave the Pullman Palace Car Works in Illinois, 1893. Photo: The Story of Pullman via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Pennsylvania Railroad began building all steel passenger cars in 1906 because it was worried about fires in the tunnels it was digging to reach Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, which opened in 1910. Other railroads followed, since steel cars held up better in accidents. These heavyweight cars, like the steel freight cars of the same period, were riveted together. Crews heated each rivet, drove it through punched plates and closed it over, which gave a strong car and a very heavy one.

Black and white photo of a long riveted steel open wagon on two bogies

A riveted steel gondola car, the first of 150 built at South Australian Railways' Islington Workshops in 1928. Photo: South Australian Railways via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Welding brought the weight down. A Budd Company engineer named Ragsdale developed shotwelding, a spot welding method in which the timing of each weld was controlled automatically, so stainless steel could be joined without losing its strength or its resistance to corrosion. Budd received US patent 1,944,106 in January 1934 and that year built the Pioneer Zephyr for the Burlington Route, a stainless steel streamliner with unibody construction. Union Pacific's M-10000, also from 1934, went a different way and used aluminium, the material most new car bodies are made of now. In the streamliner years that followed, the main US builders were Budd, Pullman and American Car and Foundry.

Rounded shiny stainless steel nose of a 1930s streamlined train with a Burlington Route sign

The shotwelded stainless steel Pioneer Zephyr of 1934 at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How robots weld train shells and bogies today

A modern car body is usually built from long aluminium extrusions or stainless steel panels, welded into side walls, a roof and a floor that are then joined into one shell. Those long seams suit robots. Engineers in Japan described a robot system for Shinkansen aluminium bodies in which two robots weld each side post from both sides at once while a gantry carries them along the car, and it had welded more than 80 car bodies. Friction stir welding, invented at The Welding Institute in the UK in 1991, is now used by Hitachi on its A-train cars and on the British Class 395.

White and purple train car body sitting on a traverser under a canopy outside a factory

A new car body on the traverser at Hitachi Newton Aycliffe, 2025. Photo: DS Pugh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Canada the work is moving toward smarter welding cells. On 17 September 2026 Alstom announced a research programme with Université Laval, UQAM and ÉTS, with the results to be tested at its La Pocatière plant in Quebec. The topics include welding procedures, augmented reality support for welders and the scheduling of robotic welding cells. La Pocatière will build the car bodies for 313 Adessia cars under VIA Rail's C$4.7 billion order, signed on 3 September, and final assembly will happen in Thunder Bay.

Large white ABB robot arm with cables pressing a tool onto a part in a factory hall

An ABB IRB 7710 or IRB 7720 robot set up for friction stir welding. Photo: ABB

ABB sells the kinds of robots these lines use, although we found no public source naming a specific rolling stock maker as an ABB customer. On an ABB positioner, an arc welding robot can turn a heavy bogie frame so that every seam is reached in a comfortable position, and tracks or gantries can carry robots along a car side. ABB also offers its large IRB 7710 and IRB 7720 arms set up for friction stir welding. When two arms need to weld the same part at once, as in the Shinkansen cell, an ABB controller can coordinate them with MultiMove.

Orange ABB welding robot next to an orange positioner holding a heavy steel bracket

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where rail car building goes next

Rail car orders are long and varied. A plant might build a few hundred cars for one city and then retool for a different design, so its automation has to handle small batches of very large parts. That pushes builders toward offline programming. A welding cell can be built and tested in simulation, with the positioner and track modelled as external axes, before the first side wall arrives, and the same model can be reused when the next order changes the window spacing or the car length.

Rows of white passenger train cars parked beside factory sheds behind railway tracks

Talgo's train factory at Rivabellosa, Spain, with new trainsets outside, 2021. Photo: Zarateman / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Laser and hybrid welding are likely next for thin stainless and aluminium panels, because they put less heat into the metal and so cause less distortion on a long side wall and less straightening afterwards. Our post on robotic laser welding explains how ABB robots carry laser heads. Bogies will probably stay with arc welding robots, since the frames are thick and the welds are safety critical, but seam tracking and camera inspection should reduce the manual checking each frame gets today.

Person guiding the welding torch of a white ABB cobot over a perforated welding table

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Cost and skilled people are the main open problems. A car body cell with a gantry, two robots and fixtures long enough for a full side wall is a big investment for a plant whose order book can swing from full to empty. Rail builders also need certified welders, both for the joints robots cannot reach and to qualify the robot procedures in the first place. That is part of why Alstom's programme will train 11 students and researchers alongside the welding research itself.

Two new metro trains parked under red gantry cranes in a factory yard

New metro trains for Chongqing and Qingdao at the CRRC Qingdao Sifang factory, 2019. Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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