INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY IN RAIL COATING & LINING FACILITIES WITHOUT SACRIFICING QUALITY Six Coating Experts Share Ideas Photo courtesy of Union Tank Car Company/UTLX. Adapted by Jim Molnar, UTLX, from the 2015 Mechanical Association Railway Technical Services Annual Conference, Protective Coatings Committee Session E ach year, the Mechanical Association of Railcar Technical Services Protective Coatings Committee assembles railcar coating experts to discuss the latest issues affecting the industry. This article is an aggregation of those discussions. INNOVATIVE COATINGS AND LININGS TECHNOLOGY FOR RAILCARS According to Vijay Datta of International Paint, formulating and testing for robustness and improved application characteristics leads to increased life and utility of rail tank car coatings in fuels and other services. He puts the menace of corrosion into financial perspective by noting that the loss of steel in railcars, as well as other steel structures in North America, adds up to a cost of corrosion 50 times greater than the total cost associat- ed with the region’s natural disasters. Datta points out that the compo- sition of some newer tank car ladings, such as crude oil and biodiesel, is non-homogeneous and variable, requiring the interior coatings used to 22 JPCL August 2016 / paintsquare.com