Lucchini Sweden AB is one of this year’s exhibitors at Train & Rail. They come to the fair from Surahammar and are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Italian Lucchini Group, based in Lovere, Italy.
We talked to Mikael Rahunen, CEO of Lucchini Sweden AB about their participation in Train & Rail 2025.
What type of company is Lucchini Sweden AB and what do you do?
We are a family-owned company and a global train wheel manufacturer with nine different subsidiaries around the world, producing wheels and axles locally, with all materials coming from the forge in Italy.
We are unique in that we have our own steel mill, so we manufacture our own material in Italy, which is then processed locally according to market needs. At Lucchini Sweden, we are responsible for the Nordic market, so we have customers in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark.
But in addition to the actual production of train wheels, which we have been doing since 1856 in Surahammar, we are also involved in train maintenance. So we do maintenance on wheelsets, bearing audits, gear audits and since 2018 we have also started with bogie audits The latest in our product portfolio is that we will now also start with audits of traction motors.
We are 100 employees today and had a turnover of approximately SEK 290 million in 2024. About 60% of the turnover is component manufacturing, i.e. wheels, rings, axles and wheelsets, and 40% is linked to the maintenance business.
Why have you chosen to participate in Train & Rail 2025?
We visited Train & Rail 2023 and quite a few of our customers asked why we were not exhibiting. As visitors, we met a lot of our customers and found it a very niche and good fair to meet everyone in the industry.
So we see it as an opportunity to meet existing customers and suppliers in particular. Because we have many suppliers who also exhibit.
We also noticed that there was no other wheel manufacturer at the fair, so it almost feels like an obligation to exhibit as the Nordic region’s only wheel manufacturer.
The fact that the fair is in Stockholm also makes it very easy to get there.
What is your objective with Train & Rail?
Effectively meeting suppliers and customers, new and existing. We also aim to introduce some of the staff during the fair. So it won’t just be us who work with customers in the usual way who are there, but we will bring staff who work with manufacturing and maintenance to answer questions from customers.
Above all, it is a way to be seen, then we have a goal to make a presentation, hopefully together with Chalmers, about wheel damage and wheel materials.
There are many people at the fair who are involved with wheels but who are not manufacturers. So here we have an opportunity to deal with some news around materials and around wheel damage and how to think about it.
What is the most important issue from your perspective for the future of railways and how are you currently working on this issue?
Right now we are in a pretty strong growth phase where we have gone from 75 employees to 100 employees in two years so of course recruitment and finding competent staff who want to work in the train industry are important issues.
On the one hand, we take on trainees for our workshop, which we test, and on the other hand, we cooperate with different types of training programs to find staff. We also participate in various networks and discuss training issues and recruitment to the train industry regionally where there are a number of companies that gather in Västerås to discuss skills development and recruitment to the train industry.
The shortage of train drivers, for example, is common knowledge and affects our customers and indirectly affects us too. So it’s important to get young people to look positively at a future in railways because there are jobs there.
What do you want from industry colleagues and policy makers to enable society to meet the demand, financial constraints and climate goals of future rail transport?
These are things that affect the industry as a whole. It feels like you need to invest in infrastructure and invest in new trains. It will help meet climate targets and create financial frameworks.
For example, in 2024 we have seen quite a few procurements that did not turn out well in the end, where various operators withdraw from contracts and emergency contracts are created because the economic conditions were not there.
So in a way, it is hoped that the industry will become a little more stable and that there will be economic conditions for being a train operator so that we can have long-term partnerships with customers who have a good deal.
It is something that may not affect us, but we feel more that the financial framework in the procurement process for train operators is not always optimally designed.
When you make a procurement, you should probably not only look at the price because it costs to run trains.