Bengal-based firm buys 100-year-old German company to expand global reach

RAIL.ONE has been selling railway sleepers across the globe and has 850 employees

It was back in 1894, that Gustav Adolf Pfleiderer established a lumber rafting and trading business in Heilbronn, Germany. By 1920, the family-owned company Pfleiderer was already supplying wooden sleepers to Deutsche Bahn (then known as Deutsche Reichsbahn), the German railway operator. Several innovations followed in the subsequent years, the company emerged as one of the important partners of Deutsche Bahn in supplying high speed tracks. Meanwhile, the Mittelstand company (term used for typically a family-owned small and medium-sized manufacturing firm in Germany) had expanded footprints across the globe.

In 2006, the track system unit of Pfleiderer, with around 850 employees,