What’s in a transition joint? “More, much more, than meets the eye - when it’s explosion welded,” says David Gauthier, Market Specialist in Multi-material Transition Joints at NobelClad. Used in shipbuilding for decades, the railway industry is now waking up to the potential of this ‘solid-state’ technique for joining dissimilar metals that, due to their metallurgy, can’t be welded in the traditional manner (by fusion).