NEW DELHI: With safety and poor asset management major cause of concern for railways, Railways is looking to shop overseas for technologies like anti-collision devices, track monitoring systems and rail fracture detection systems among others to bring down the number of derailments.
While the indigenously developed anti-collision system T-CAS (Collision Avoidance System) has been on trials for last three years, Railways is now exploring the technologies available with some of the technology advanced railways like French, Japan and Germany among others.
Indian Railways has seen rise in derailments in 2016 with 67 cases reported this year compared to 52 during the same period last year.
Railways has invited over three-dozen international companies to display available technologies in four key areas -- enhanced safety, reduced in-service failures and automated health monitoring and inspection, capacity enhancement and congestion reduction and enhanced customer service.
The government run transporter with a total fleet of approximately 64,000 coaches and 2.5 lakh wagons, is running about 22,600 passengers and freight trains every day, carrying over 25 million passengers and 3 million tonnes of freight on its 67,000 route kilometers of railway network.
“In view of emerging requirements, there is an urgent need to induct cutting edge technologies on Indian Railways. Towards this objective, railway is organizing ‘Global Technologies Conference’ on May 3-4, for assessing contemporary global technologies, relevant for adoption on Indian Railways,” said R K Kulshrestha, Director General, Research Designs and Standards Organisation(RDSO). It is the research arm of railways.
The idea is to provide a multi-disciplinary platform for the industry, academia and research fraternity across the world to interact with experts of railways for identification of appropriate cutting edge technologies and systems available for adaptation and deployment on railways.
Interestingly, the railways will not be displaying any available or under development technologies at the event that will be held in the capital.
“There will be audio-visual display of TCAS system. We are the host and we will not be presenting our work in the conference,” said J S Sondhi, Additional Director General, RDSO.