Tiflex Ltd is celebrating 75 years of specialised rubber manufacturing in the UK.
We have a rich heritage of supplying products across several markets and around the world including oil and gas, marine, leisure and commercial, and defence as well as rail, both track and rolling stock. We operate under several brands including Trackalast, Tico, Treadmaster Marine and of course Treadmaster Flooring.
TM7 is Treadmaster Flooring’s highest-grade rubber flooring and was first developed by Tiflex Ltd in Cornwall directly following the King’s Cross Tube disaster of 1987 and as part of the subsequent drive from TfL to source the safest-possible products for their London Underground trains, tracks and buildings.
Undergoing many developments and improvements over the following years, Treadmaster TM7 continues to be manufactured from scratch at the Tiflex factory in Liskeard. It has a unique homogenous construction meaning the surface appearance is completely consistent throughout the body of the product. This has meant that the product has maintained its integrity and appearance over several decades and can be re-worked rather than replaced for light damage. It performs extremely well in terms of wear resistance in most industrial and high-traffic areas and maintains a clean and aesthetically pleasing finish through its entire life. Currently we believe it to be the safest rubber flooring on the market today in terms of fire safety. It easily complies with the British Standard BS69853: 1999 Category 1a and the European Norm, EN45545-2 HL-3 on all substrates, where the British Standard, we believe, is the more stringent of the two.
In 2018 the New European Rail Fire standard EN45545-2 became mandatory across the EU and has taken over from existing national standards such as BS6853. The key focus of this was to harmonise rail fire standards across Europe making it easier for European companies to have access to the wider European market without having to meet all of the previously existing national fire standards.
In some quarters the new EN45545-2 standard is acknowledged as being less stringent than the existing national standards and as a consequence, some materials that didn’t meet the old national standards may now meet the new European standard. We believe homogenous rubber flooring falls into this category and have tried to communicate that to specifiers so they might consider this when choosing products.
We have run basic comparative fire tests for ourselves using samples of other prominent rubber flooring manufacturers and it’s our opinion that the difference is notable. We believe that specifiers and operators should not feel pressured to reduce costs by using materials that would not have previously met the national standard but now meet the European standard.
Tiflex is a relatively small but specialised British factory and that means that we can be flexible. Our flooring is made from scratch and to the specifiers’ exact requirements in terms of length, width and thickness. We can manufacture to almost any colour with other variants including chip ratio and size and several finishes. We operate against a minimum order quantity of just 80 square metres which gives the specifier several options in terms of colour reference, size and finish.
Although we can supply standardised rolls for the installer to cut down on-site, we mostly provide a tailored service, sending full kits out, packaged in such a way that the receiver can offload in order of installation. All our Treamaster Flooring options can now be supplied with a 3M high-bond PSA backing and, in many cases the flooring can be packaged flat, saving further time and money.
We have decades of experience of working with designers, specifiers and installers of high- performing rubber flooring on rolling stock throughout the world, and often provide consultations.
