Rarely seen by the general public, railroad excavators are a critical piece of the infrastructure puzzle: one that can travel directly on the tracks while excavating, lifting and removing obstacles from the track, working on everything from track maintenance and renovation to utility projects and civil construction. This one is electric.
Jointly developed by Dutch equipment brand AMT and construction company Royal BAM, the TW series of electric railway excavators (available in sizes 150, 160 and 180, representing 18 to 24 metric ton classes) are all-electric machines that feature a 600V electrical system driving a water-cooled permanent magnet electric motor producing 121 kW (~160 hp).
The motor draws power from a set of four 90 kWh battery packs (360 kWh total) that offer between 8 and 16 hours of continuous operation. What’s interesting, however, is not only that the batteries are interchangeable to help keep the excavator running: they are hot-swappable, meaning it can continue running on two or three batteries while a second machine removes one and puts in another, so the equipment can continue traveling on the rails.
What’s more, the same 90 kWh modular battery packs can be shared across multiple AMT machines, preventing energy from being stranded on idle assets and reducing overall labor investment in batteries and machinery in the same way (and for the same reasons) that similar systems work for Craftsman, Milwaukee and Ryobi.
Hot swap, won’t stop
However, the clever battery-swapping trick doesn’t mean AMT has treated charging as an afterthought. The excavator’s onboard charger can charge the batteries up to 120kW, which the company says can take the full 260kW pack from 20-80% SOC in less than two hours, so you won’t need three or four machines to make the investment in the battery pack make sense.
You can check out some of the specifications of the AMT electric rail excavator in the company’s online brochure and then let us know what you think about the machine’s hot-swap battery trick in the comments.
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