A great surprise on display in Leizing, Austria were three specialist vehicles for Network Rail, the UK's network provider. A further two were in a nearby siding.

The units are Plasser & Theurer MFS-D and are manufactured in Liezen. The nearest unit is DR 92372, and all are ballast cleaner spoil wagons. If viewers are unsure of the use for these wagons, read on : They are self loading/unloading spoil wagons for the two new Plasser High Output Ballast Claning System [HOBCS] trains currently being supplied to Network Rail at a cost of £24m per train. Besides handling spoil from the cleaning operation, they also bring to site and distribute new, clean ballast as well Until recently, ballast cleaning machines [also a Plasser product] loaded their spoil into ordinary wagons on a train on the adjacent track to the one being ballast cleaned. This of course means that both tracks of a double line railway are blocked for the operation. If this was not possible, or if the machine was to be used on a single line railway, the spoil was usually ejected on to the lineside. If cleaning on top of an embankment, fine, the spoil went down the bank. If you were in a cutting, often it was washed back down to the track again in a few weeks. For some time now this practice has been outlawed on environmental grounds. To allow ballast cleaning on single lines and to allow traffic to use the "unaffected" line on a double track railway, Plassers have designed, built and supplied these spoil wagons. They are marshalled behind the ballast cleaner at its spoil elevator end, on the same track as is being cleaned. Each wagon has a conveyor belt running from one end to the other under the wagon body, and a "receiving bin " at one end ( at the left hand end of the wagons in the picture). The conveyor in the wagon floor extends to reach over the "receiving bin" on the next wagon. When the ballast cleaner begins to produce spoil, the spoil elevator discharges it into the receiving bin of the first wagon, which then passes the spoil on to the wagons conveyor, which passes it back to the next wagon, to the next wagon, etc until the wagon furthest away from the ballast cleaner is filled. The system then fills the 2nd wagon and so on, the wagon next to the ballast cleaner being the last one to be loaded. The train can also unload itself at a suitable location by means of the chutes [seen underneath the wagons behind the parking brake wheel]. These wagons do not operate individually, but are always kept in complete rakes. There have been a number of similar vehicles in the UK since the 1990's , used independently with conventional ballast cleaners, as well as a set supplied to one of the major aggregates suppliers as a self unloading stone train. Kibri currently offers a kit to make a model of the European/UIC guage version of this vehicle [MFS-100],(HO catalogue number 16150). The kit price of at approximately GBP60,00 (Euro 85.00) appears to reflect the price tag of the prototypes!", Fuller details on Plasser's own site under RM900RT High output ballast cleaning system HOBCS for Network Rail

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from material supplied by Alan Mackie
update 30th June 2005

Design and © : July 2004 Ron Ferguson