Railways uses lockdown to remove bottlenecks

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 2

The Railways has used the lockdown period for executing some complex and long-pending maintenance works such as remodelling of the railway yard, and redoing tracks from where a train can switch from a track to another one. Several bridges have been repaired and the long-disused foot overbridge at Ludhiana has also been removed.

In Ludhiana, the 100-year-old twin foot overbridges were closed to passenger use since 2014. However, dismantling of the bridge, which had overhead electric supply line running under it, meant the closure of 10 to 12 hours for several days, which was not feasible on the New Delhi- Amritsar route. Now, during the lockdown, the dismantling of these FOBs has been planned to complete traffic blocks of 8 to 10 hrs.

Apart from ensuring supply chains of all essential commodities running through parcel trains and freight trains, the Indian Railways executed these long-pending maintenance works during the lockdown period when passenger services were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Railways said in a statement.

The Indian Railways focused on several long-pending overdue maintenance works requiring traffic block of long durations. These works were pending for several years and were posing as severe bottlenecks.

Indian Railways planned these works during the lockdown period considering it ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ to wipe out these maintenance arrears and take up the execution of work without affecting the train service.

Around 500 modern heavy-duty track maintenance machines along with the track, signal and overhead equipment (OHE), maintainers have worked regularly to complete overdue track maintenance of 12,270-km of the track.

The health of the track has been monitored through periodic runs of Oscillation Monitoring System (OMS), cumulating 1.92 lakh km of the track at as many as 5,362 peak locations.

Ultrasonic flaw detection (USFD) of 30,182 km of track and on more than 1.34 lakh welding joint has been carried out 1,34,443 rail welds has been carried out with USFD machine. Critical summer precaution activities such as de-stressing of long-welded rail (LWR), which involved huge manpower, has been taken up with a new procedure for carrying out the work with ensuring social-distancing norms. As many as 2,246 km of de-stressing of LWR has been done.