CHENNAI: Railway experts pointed that many sections of the Indian Railways were reported to be saturated with a line capacity utilisation of over 100 percent of its planned capacity, according railway experts told a seminar organized by Institution of Railway Signal and Telecommunication Engineers, Chennai chapter, here on Thursday.
The steep increase in traffic, they said, resulted in acute congestion on trunk routes. This in turn caused reduction of speed of the trains, consequently increasing transit time and wagon turn–around.
Two senior engineers J Saravnan and Muthu Krishnan said that there was a dire need to augment line capacity with less investment to achieve traffic and financial targets.
“With the existing block sections it is impossible to increase the line capacity,” they said. The duo suggested doubling of lines as a solution to increase the capacity, which does not incur huge infrastructure expenditure.” The seminar deliberated on the topic “Signaling and Telecommunication for Line Capacity Augmentation and Safety in Railways”.
Speaking on the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) project, Priyamvada Viswanathan, CTPM, S. railway, said the the Railways had envisaged DFC as a solution for the line capacity problems. But this project could not bring in a solution, she said, adding that, “It has a long gestation period and hence cannot address the immediate requirement.”
The project addressed only the needs of freight traffic and it was assumed that passenger traffic on congested routes fillede the slots vacated by freight trains. “This assumption is not correct as the surge in passenger traffic demand cannot be fully met by slots vacated by fright trains,” pointed out Priyamvada.
Hence, the implementation of automatic signaling had been considered as the most cost effective tech no-solution for enhancing line capacity in a short span of time.
Mansing, Chief Safety Officer said that Anti Collision Device (ADC) needed to be further improved to bring in a feature to take care of collision situations in station areas by taking feed back from the existing systems.
He emphasized that ACD was a commitment of Indian Railways to the Parliament to cover the entire broad gauge network by 2013 –2014.“TPWS works on the Delhi-Agra and Madras –Gummidipundi line. No further plans for TPWS works,” he said.KK Bajpeyee, chairman of Indian Section of IRSE in the UK, inaugurated the seminar. Many retired and serving railway officers participated.