At the 2025 PWI NSW Awards Night (19 February 2026, Ivy Ballroom, Sydney), the Ken Erickson Innovation Award was presented for the Heavy Duty Bow Plate, developed through collaboration between ARTC – Australian Rail Track Corporation and Cold Forge Products (CFP).
The award recognises practical innovation delivering measurable improvement to rail infrastructure.
Engineering Context
Within the ARTC Hunter Valley Heavy Haul Coal Network, trains operate at very high frequency — on average every ten minutes. Any infrastructure issue that stops rail traffic has immediate impacts on reliability across the supply chain.
A significant contributor to network disruption had been broken thermite welds.
Historically, when a weld failed there was no suitable temporary repair option. The damaged section of rail had to be cut out and a closure rail installed and welded, typically resulting in around six hours of track possession while the repair was completed.
ARTC identified the need for a temporary repair solution capable of safely supporting heavy haul traffic across a broken weld until permanent repairs could be undertaken.
The Solution
Cold Forge Products worked with ARTC – Australian Rail Track Corporation to develop the concept of a Heavy Duty Bow Plate capable of plating a broken weld and allowing trains to continue operating under controlled speed until a planned permanent repair can be completed.
Cold Forge developed the concept and engineering brief in collaboration with ARTC, with Reliance Hexham undertaking the detailed design and manufacture of the plates to that brief.
This converts what was previously an immediate reactive intervention into a controlled, planned maintenance activity, improving both safety and network reliability.
Technical Design
The plates incorporate several design features developed specifically for heavy haul conditions:
• Designed for 30TAL heavy haul traffic over a broken weld, unlike traditional bow plates
• Offset plate configurations (0mm, 3mm, 6mm and 9mm) allowing accommodation of rail head height mismatch across welds
• Integrated flange clearance recess preventing wheel flange contact with the plate under worst-case wheel and rail wear conditions
The design was developed using finite element analysis (FEA) to model track stiffness, wheel impact loading, thermal rail forces and wheel profile variation across rollingstock operators.
Field Trials and Validation
Field trials were undertaken at Port Waratah, where a weld was intentionally cut to simulate a break.
A Heavy Duty Bow Plate instrumented with strain gauges was installed and monitored under 30TAL traffic to confirm the design assumptions.
The measured loads aligned with the design modelling and the plates progressed through type approval and operational deployment.
Since implementation, the plates have been used multiple times across the network with no recorded failures.
Operational Impact
Previously, a broken weld could stop train operations for approximately six hours while a closure rail was sourced and installed.
The Heavy Duty Bow Plate allows a temporary repair to be installed in around one hour, enabling trains to continue running under controlled conditions until permanent repairs can be scheduled.
This provides measurable benefits in:
- network reliability
- maintenance planning
- operational safety
Product Evolution
In addition to the Heavy Duty Bow Plate, Cold Forge has also released a full range of Australian-made bowplates for standard duty applications.
https://www.coldforge.com.au/products/bow-lok-offset-bow-plate
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