“Railway RAMS” stands for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety.
In recent years conformity to the RAMS standard is often required in the contract of overseas railway projects (in Europe and Southeast Asia in particular) and companies incapable of satisfying the requirements are likely to be excluded from the candidacy of bidding.
While Japanese railway vehicles are at the best quality level in the world without doubt, they are based on standards created in Europe and, because detail technical preliminary examination based on data is necessary, Japanese enterprises that have been less enthusiastic in data accumulation are behind the race in view of conformity to the RAMS standard.
In recent years, conformity to the RAMS standard is required not only for passenger cars but also for maintenance vehicles, and we decided to conform to the RAMS standard.
While the current project is rather hard to achieve for not a large enterprise such as us because a good sum must be paid to a professional consultant, the experience can be applied to later projects once data accumulation is made, so that we will be able to meet requirements for conformity to the RAMS standard in maintenance vehicles, which may be requested for in projects ordered by a trading company or passenger car manufacturer, at lower costs.

Documents we are preparing for the project described in the article above include the following.