Measures initiated to boost Railway infra: Min’

| | NEW DELHI
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Measures initiated to boost Railway infra: Min’

Saturday, 19 September 2020 | Staff Reporter | NEW DELHI

With an aim to increase the speed and ensure timely running of trains including goods trains, Indian Railways has initiated several measures for upgrading the infrastructure, modernising the rolling stock for streamlining operations.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal said the blueprint for increasing the speeds of trains will be taken such as including increasing the track speeds on trunk routes to 130 Kmph, enhancing the speed potential of Golden Quadrilateral and its diagonal to 160 Kmph.

Accordingly, 160 Kmph projects on the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah sectors are already sanctioned, he said, adding that discontinuance of manufacturing of Integral Coach Factory (ICF) design coaches with ‘Maximum Permissible Speed’ (MPS) of 110 kmph and enhanced manufacture of Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) coaches with MPS of 160 Kmph.

“Introduction of modern signaling systems such as ‘Train Collision Avoidance System’ (TCAS), accelerated removal of permanent speed restrictions, construction of roads over bridges and under bridges will also be done to eliminate level crossing gates,” he said.       

"The average running speeds of trains on railway systems depend upon various factors, such as, type of track structure, signalling systems, motive power, type of rolling stock, network congestion, etc,” he said.

“Some of the international railway systems, such as the Shinkansen in Japan and theTGV system in France, have dedicated networks of high speed railway lines with maximum speeds over 300 Kmph. The average running speeds of all categories of trains across different railway systems abroad are not compiled,” he added.

The railway minister further said that Indian Railways has a heterogeneous system with freight trains and passenger carrying trains being operated on common tracks with a very high level of capacity utilization.

During the financial year 2019-20, the average speed of premium trains (Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duranto and Vande Bharat) was above 70 kmph, Superfast trains was above 55 kmph, express services was above 50 kmph and that of freight trains was 24 kmph. However, during the current financial year, i.e. 2020-21, the average speed of freight trains has increased to 46.71 kmph, he said.

In reply to another question, he said that Indian Railways has planned to set up solar plants on its vacant land and along the tracks. “As a part of this initiative, 4.7 Mega Watt (MW) land based solar plants have already been commissioned. Action has been taken for installation of solar power projects on unused railway land at Bhilai (Chhattisgarh, 50 MegaWatt (MW), Diwana (Haryana, 2 MW)

To further proliferate solar plants, railways has planned to install solar plants of 20 Giga Watt (GW) capacity by the year 2030 by utilizing its vacant land and to begin with, bids for 3 GW solar plants on vacant railway land parcels and land parcels along the railway track have already been invited, he said.

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