Railway sleepers

The Puente Genil factory was set up in 1989 following the award of a contract for 1.2 million sleepers for use in the construction of the Madrid-Seville high speed train line.

The manufacturing system used is the pre-stressed moulded sleeper, which provides significant advantages because:

  • By moulding the anchor feet using a distribution piece, stress is more evenly distributed across the sleeper. It no longer depends exclusively on adhesion between the steel and the concrete, even though it does maintain the inherent advantages of contact between steel and concrete along the sleeper’s longitudinal axis.
  • The need to immediately transmit stress when releasing the mould ensures the concrete’s strength features have to be guaranteed.
  • The concrete setting process in a mould ensures greater standards of accuracy in the geometrics of the top sleeper over other systems.
  • The combination of the anchor head formed in any pre-stressed, with the steel-concrete adherence that is provided by the bench system, makes for doubly improved structural performance of the sleeper.

Since it was set up, the factory has produced more than 5 million sleepers for both the Hi-Speed Infrastructure and Maintenance and Infrastructure of ADIF and Private Contractors. It is also an ADIF approved supplier of sleepers.

Since 2014, Prefabricados Delta has supplied a new product for solutions in railroad tunnels and viaducts, namely the twin-block reinforced concrete slab sleeper for tracks with both Spanish and International gauge.