REICH supplies couplings with fire protection certified elastomers to the railway industry

Dipl.-Ing. Herwarth Reich GmbH in Bochum is supplying the railway and traffic engineering industry with highly flexible rubber couplings – classified according to the European fire protection standard DIN EN 45545.

Developing and advancing its elastomers has always been one of the focuses and salient quality features of REICH, a company known to manufacture high-quality and long-lasting products for power transmission engineering by using the latest production equipment and its own test benches.

"While remaining true to our guiding principle 'Designed to Customer', we keep advancing our elastomers and complete coupling system solutions at our headquarter in Bochum, enabling us to tailor them even better to our customers' needs – in this case for the purposes of fire protection in railway traffic", emphasizes Christian Reich, managing director at Dipl.-Ing. Herwarth Reich GmbH.

The high temperature resistance elastomers "NY – SY", which can be used in an environment up to 130°C, and the standard mixtures "SN (T) – UN (T)" successfully passed the fire protection tests and thus fulfil the requirements set R9 for hazard level HL2. The pertinent certificate was issued by the Dortmund-based Testing Laboratory for Fire Protection DMT GmbH & Co. KG and classifies the REICH elastomers according to DIN EN 45545.

The objective of this European Standard is to minimize the likelihood of a fire breakout in railway application and to limit the speed and spread of fire propagation so as to keep the impacts of a potential fire as small as possible for both the passengers and the personnel. For this reason, all components, products and materials which are mounted in public railway vehicles are required to comply with special fire protection requirements.

As a globally active company of long tradition, REICH has over 70 years of experience and is well familiar with the special requirements imposed on coupling solutions for railway applications.