HEFEI -- An intelligent production base for recycling railway materials went into operation Wednesday in Ma'anshan city, East China's Anhui province, greatly enhancing the efficiency of recycling railway scrap.

With three automatic production lines, the facility can dismantle 4,000 scrapped locomotives, and freight and passenger coaches, and dispose of 125,000 tonnes of scrapped steel rails and 58,000 tonnes of scrap metal a year.

Robots are used in the detection, cutting, and transport of such scrap railway materials while advanced technologies including 5G, big data and cloud computing are applied to establish a traceability system and achieve full life cycle management of the products.

"A scrap freight wagon can be dismantled automatically by robots and then be further processed by the production line within just one hour," said Xia Yang, general manager of China Railway Materials Group Resources Technology Co Ltd, an investor in the recycling facility.

According to Xia, those scrap materials can be processed into ironware and parts of agricultural and engineering machinery.