E-quipment highlight: AMT’s hot-swapping battery electric rail excavator

This news is about rail maintenance equipment, not something that affects home energy upgrades. A Dutch company, AMT, working with construction firm Royal BAM, has built an all-electric excavator that runs directly on train tracks for maintenance and construction work. It comes in three sizes and runs on a 600-volt system with an electric motor producing about 160 horsepower.

The machine draws power from four 90 kWh battery packs, for 360 kWh total, giving it 8 to 16 hours of run time. The standout feature is that the batteries can be hot-swapped, meaning a second machine can pull one battery pack out and drop in a charged one while the excavator keeps working on its remaining packs, so the job never has to stop for a full recharge. These same battery packs are designed to be shared across different AMT machines, which cuts down on how much battery capacity sits unused in idle equipment and lowers the total cost of batteries and gear needed for a job site.

The excavator also has an onboard charger that can charge at up to 120 kW, bringing a pack from 20 to 80 percent charge in under two hours, so operators are not forced to buy extra machines just to keep batteries cycling. This is industrial rail equipment with no direct bearing on home energy projects or rebates.