Railways to retrofit coaches with safety mechanism soon
CHENNAI: Launching a major initiative to improve the safety of the railway coaches, the Railways will soon begin retrofitting thousands of rakes with a mechanism that would stop them from climbing over another in the event of an accident.
The decision came in the aftermath of the Indore-Patna Express accident last November, which killed over 150 commuters, officials told Express.
The Integral Coach Factory here will completely stop manufacturing old rakes. Now it has gone for the German-designed Linke Hofmann Busch coaches which are considered much safer than conventional coaches.
But there still are an estimated 40,000 coaches still in use by various railway zones.
Following that accident, the crash-worthiness of these ICF coaches was debated, as there were renewed calls to comply with the suggestion made by the Anil Kakodkar committee in 2012 to replace all coaches with safer LHB coaches.
Now, the Railway Board has taken the policy decision to retrofit Centre Buffer Coupler (CBC) on these coaches.
A coupler is a mechanism for connecting rolling stock or coaches with each other in a train. The ICF coaches have the old and unreliable screw-coupler technology, which carries the maximum risk of coaches climbing over each other during an accident. In comparison, the CBC, which absorbs high frequency forces during impact, has the inherent anti-climbing feature thereby reducing life and property damage.
“The target for next five years is to retrofit CBC on 40,000 coaches, with an average of 8,000 yearly,” Sudhanshu Mani, ICF General Manager, told Express. Instead of ICF, it will be railway carriage workshops across the country, including the one at Perambur, that would carry out the work.
“The ICF stopped making of conventional coaches with screw-coupler technology two months ago. The new LHB coaches are rolled out with CBC technology,” the General Manager said.
Listing out the other significant benefit of CBC, which enables a firm lower and upper body connection, he said this technology is easily capable of hauling longer trains of 24 coaches, which is now becoming a normal rake composition.