Dellner Couplers AB is a Swedish original equipment manufacturer of train connection systems as couplers, gangway systems and dampers. The headquarter of the company is located in Vika in the Falun Municipality. Dellner is owned by the investment organisation EQT Partners and has 19 subsidiaries worldwide with around 1,100 employees. In 2018, the company generated annual sales of around SEK 1.9 billion (EUR 180 million).[3]
History
Dellner was founded in 1941 by the Swedish engineer Jan Dellner.[4] The first customer was Swedish State Railways, for whom the Engineering Bureau Dellner produced automatic couplers. In the following years, the company, based in the small town of Vika in central Sweden, expanded its business and supplied automatic couplers to numerous customers in Europe, such as the Warsaw Metro, Paris Metro, SNCF, Rome Metro and Italian State Railways. From 1982 onwards, train couplers were also supplied to countries outside Europe. At that time Dellner had around 90 employees in Sweden, the US and Canada.[5]
From 1984 Dellner was the first manufacturer to build a gas-hydraulic damper, which was integrated into the draft gear of couplers. This was followed in 1997 by the production of snow gaiters and front hatch mechanisms. In 2003 Dellner introduced a new crash concept for couplers with multiple-stage deformation tubes, followed in 2008 by a high-speed data transmission system for automatic couplers.[citation needed]
Dellner's coupling business has traded under various names over the years. In 1952, the Engineering Bureau Dellner was renamed Runnvika Mechanical Workshop, later the coupling business traded under the names Jan Dellner & Co, AB Dellner Malmco and finally as Dellner Couplers AB. Dellner Couplers AB became a subsidiary of Dellner Invest, which was founded in 1992.[6]
Diversification, growth and restructuring
In 2009, Dellner acquired the British gangway systems manufacturer Woodville.[7] With this step, the company manifested its expansion from a manufacturer of coupling systems and related products to a manufacturer of train connection systems, covering the entire range of products to connect passenger trains. At that time, Dellner had about 500 employees worldwide.[8]
In 2019, Dellner Invest sold the Dellner Couplers Group including all international subsidiaries and Dellner Dampers to the private equity firm EQT.[9] In early 2021, Dellner acquired the couplers business of CAF MiiRA, a subsidiary of the Spanish train and bus producer Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles.[10]
During the 2010s, Deller has grown steadily: the company claims to employ 1,100 people in 2024 and has 19 branches worldwide. Dellner Couplers has production facilities in India, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the USA.[11]
Dellner manufactures couplers connecting vehicle, pneumatics and electronics at the same time.[12] The patented energy absorption D-BOX technology allows coupling at speeds of up to 15 kilometres per hour (9 mph) with no structural damage, and up to 36 kilometres per hour (22 mph) with deformation but with the vehicles remaining on track. The patented D-REX system provides Ethernet high speed data connection at speeds of 100 Mbit/s.
Dellner is part of the European Union's Shift2Rail initiative, which promotes the digitalisation and automation of rail freight transport in Europe.[13]
