The foundation stone for the Rail Coach factory at Kapurthala was laid by the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India on 17th August 1985. Manufacture of coaches beagn on 19th september 1987 and the first coach was rolled out on 31st march 1988. RCF's production has progressively gone up and along with ICF; the two production Units have been able to meet the Requirements of Indian Railways. RCf has mnufactured 17958 coaches till 31st March'2007.

RCF turned out 1319 coaches, the highest ever production of coaches in the year 2006-07. It comprised of 358 Nos. conventional AC coaches and 119 Nos. modern stainles steel coaches. RCF's turn over reached approx. Rs.955 crores. Materials worth Rs.815 crores were procured from trade out of which approx. Rs.250 crores worth purchases were made from Punjab and Chandigarh based industries.

Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala, a Production Unit of Indian Railways, spread over an area of 1200 acres is located just 8kms from Kapurthala 20 ferozpur highway. This is the most modern manufacturing unit in Indian Railways and one of the largest producers of coaches in the world. Rcf has iducted State-of-the-art machinery & plant and processes for manufacturing high precision sub-assemblies/assemblies formanufacturing cpaches e.g. Cold Roll Forming, CNC Underwater Plasma Cutting, CNC Laser Cutting and Welding Machine, Polyurethane and Epoxy Painting system, Robotic Spot welding machine, Robotic Blasting Machine, Robotic Welding manipulator and CNC Laser profile Cutting Machine etc. RCF has a well-equipped testing laboratory for chemical and mettalurgical testing of materials and a training institute for training of railway Personnels. The Computer Aided Design and computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) Centre equipped with large number of designs an drafting workstations is the nerve centre of RCF's design and engineering activites. With the help of this facility, RCF, today is in a position to evelve designs to suit specific user requirements for different types of railway coaches and specail purpose transport vehicles.

RCF has a strong tradation of innovtions and developing new products. Many major developments on coaching stock such as manufacture of AC-3 tier Coaches, Roof Nounted AC pacakage unit, IRY/IR20 coaches, Self Propelled Accident Relief train, High Capacity Parcel Vans, Coaching COntainer Flats, Refrigerated Vans and MG-DMUs etc. have taken place in RCF. RCF entered in to Transfer of Technology agreement with M/s. Alstom-LHB, Germany to manufacture modern high speed, state-of-the-art stainless steel caoches. RCF has since manufactured twelve Rajdhani Rakes for Western, Eastern and EC Railway for running between Mumbai-New Delhi, Howrah/Sealdah-New Delhi and Patna-New Delhi. RCF has also turned out four rakes for Shatabdih Express, running over Northern Railway. RCF has manufactured ans supplied coaches for five rakes of Garib rath trains and planning to manufacture seven more rakes in the current year. This innovative product has brought AC travel within the reach of ordinary passengers as fare is forty percent less than AC conventional three tier coach. Breaking ground on the Export front, RCF has manufactured and supplied 36 coaches to Myanmar Railways in the year 2005-06 and 70 Day coaches to Senegal and Mali Railway during 2006-07.

RCF has been adjudged the winner "Golden Peacock" award for Eco-Innovation 2006 by the World Environment Foundation during 8th World Congree on Environment Management held in June 2006.