Peaker Services chugs along repairing train engines
A locomotive sat on the rails outside Peaker Services Inc. last month in Green Oak Township.
It wasn’t there to make a delivery; it was there for engine repairs.
Company officials say Peaker Services is the only company in Michigan that specializes in rebuilding and servicing diesel-electric engines used to power trains, Great Lakes freighters, oil rigs and other industrial equipment.
The powerful engines can range from 2,000 horsepower to 4,000 horsepower.
While it occasionally services entire locomotives, most of the train engines rebuilt and repaired at Peaker Services have already been removed from the locomotives and delivered by truck. The steel engines can weigh more than 20 tons and are moved around the 45,000-square-foot facility with the help of two 15-ton overhead cranes.
“This company is pretty unique. Our clients are mostly Class 1 railroads like CSX,” said Chuck Wagnitz, production manager. “We get some Union Pacific engines here, and we work with a lot of Canadian and overseas customers. We just did some engines that went to Sweden.”
Wagnitz has been with the company for 36 years and is in charge of a crew of nearly 30 — welders, machinists, etc. — in the production facility.
Brand-new engines can run into the millions of dollars, Wagnitz said, so railroads keep decades-old engines in use by having them rebuilt and maintained by Peaker Services.
“The engines are very repairable,” Wagnitz said. “You can cut and weld on them and remachine them back to standard sizes. It’s easy engine work if the parts are still available. We work on engines that were built in the 1950s, even older than that sometimes.”
Company President Ian Bradbury said the engines “were designed to be rebuilt, rebuilt and rebuilt.”
“All of the stuff that wears out can be removed, replaced, reconditioned ... and brought up to modern standards,” Bradbury said.
Peaker Services typically works on 50 to 75 engines a year and can rebuild an engine in roughly six weeks, Wagnitz said, noting that there can be as many as 20 engines in the shop at a given time.
“We do complete overhauls, and we do custom repair,” he said. “A complete overhaul is to tear it all apart and rebuild it. Custom repair would be to just fix what’s broken. That’s why people like to come to Peaker, because we only do what they ask us to do. We have a good reputation in the industry.”
Wagnitz said his crew has made some surprising discoveries when tearing apart an engine. “You’d be amazed at what we find in there: flashlights, blocks of wood, screwdrivers, wrenches, bolts, nuts, you name it.”
As part of the process, a high-pressure vertical block washer sprays a solution that removes oil, paint and other contaminants from the engines.
After an engine has been remanufactured or repaired, it’s time for a test run.
Peaker Services has its own locomotive, or test cell, to put the engines through their paces. Wagnitz said the test locomotive was modified so it can run all of the different configurations of engines, from an eight-cylinder all the way to a 20-cylinder. Testing can take four hours to eight hours.
“The engine gets load tested, and we verify that it performs exactly as it’s supposed to perform,” Bradbury said.
Peaker Services was established in a small garage in Belleville in the early 1970s, when it primarily worked on diesel generators, or “peakers” as they are known in the utility industry. In 1978, the company moved to Green Oak Township.
Today it employs more than 70 people, including those in sales and others out in the field who do repairs, preventive maintenance and problem solving, said Bradbury, who has been with Peaker Services since 1997.
“We are a fairly small company with really capable, really creative people who work together very well,” he said.
Peaker Services is at 8080 Kensington Court in Green Oak Township. To learn more, visit http://peaker.com or call 800-622-4224.
Contact Livingston Daily reporter Mike Lammi at 517-552-2854 or at mlammi@livingstondaily.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeLammi.