The Hindu Business Line : Raising rail freight capacity

THE Indian Railways is looking to expand transport capacity, if possible through techniques that need minimum investments. One option under consideration is increasing the maximum permissible speed limit of the freight trains to 100 km per hour from 75 km now, on the main trunk routes connecting Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata as also the Kolkata-Mumbai and Delhi-Chennai sectors.

The Expert Group of the RITES (Rail India Technical and Economic Services), examining the issue at the behest of Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd, is yet to firm up its views on the matter, but is believed to be favourably disposed towards this plan.

The six routes — that is, Golden Quadrilateral and the diagonal sections — together covering about 10,000 km out of the total railway network of 66,000 km account for nearly 75 per cent of the total traffic of the Railways, both freight and passenger. More important, these routes are grossly saturated with almost 60 per cent of the section capacity appropriated by passenger traffic even as the demand for passenger trains goes up further aggravating the prospects of capacity constraints for the movement of freight trains.

Interestingly, this is not for the first time that the issue of increasing the maximum permissible speed limit of freight train is coming up for a review. The past 50 years have seen umpteen debates over this issue.

Theoretically, maximum section capacity is achieved when all the trains run at the same speed. However, this does not happen in reality. In practice, there is a wide disparity between passenger trains running at 100-130 km/hour and goods trains at 75 km/hour. If this gap is closed by speeding up goods trains to 90/100 km/hour, there can be a 15-20 per cent increment in section capacity.

In fact, in 2000, several freight rakes, made up of Box-N high-speed wagons, were run successfully on experimental basis at 100 km/h on the Gomoh-Mughalsarai section, some even up to Ghaziabad.

However, widespread application could not happen for such technical reasons as limited availability of high-speed wagons, sluggish pick up of speed of the existing locomotives, non-availability of strong couplers and lack of compatibility of the signalling system with longer braking distances envisaged with the high-speed operations.

But, then, the matter stopped there, presumably because of the lack of interest on the part of the Railways to pursue it. Not many corridors were thought fit to run such high speed trains which would also require close monitoring as on the same tracks also ran passenger super-fasts such as the Rajdhani Express or the Shatabdi Express.

Historically, the Railways has been investing in one common infrastructure for heavy haul goods trains, fast mail/express trains, passenger trains, container trains and commuter trains. The operating and infrastructure requirements of each are vastly different and at times contradictory. This pattern of investments lacked focus and, not unexpectedly, delivered only compromise solutions. As a result, the Railways has ended up building an infrastructure that is not optimised for any kind of traffic.

If the objective is to achieve quantum jump in the rail transportation capacity, then, many in the Railways strongly feel that all such measures as increasing the maximum speed limit of the goods trains on certain corridors, laying a third line or patch doubling; these can only be palliatives. From the safety point of view also, running high speed goods trains on the same tracks as superfast passenger trains, stopping passenger trains and commuter trains is fraught with grave consequences.

A long-term solution lies in putting in place a more efficient fleet of wagons. In India, the payload to tare ratio of wagons is 2.4:1 compared to 5:1 in the US. Which means the average loading capacity of our wagons is much less than that in the US. According to one estimate, the Indian Railways carries 450 kg of dead weight for moving every tonne of traffic as against 170 kg in advanced countries. The axle load of our wagons is 20.3 tonnes compared to 32.5 tonnes in the US; this slated to rise to 37.5-40 tonnes. The diameter of the wheels of Indian wagons is 1000 mm compared to 840 mm in advanced countries. We have opted for broad gauge, 5ft 6 inches between rails compared the standard 4ft 8.5 inches all over the world.

This intrinsic advantage of wider gauge is lost due to our adopting a highly restrictive moving dimensions. It is not that Rail Bhavan madarins are unaware of all these but then something happens somewhere and the old systems continue.

If the Railways is really keen on achieving a significant jump in traffic throughput, it must progressively segregate the track network of the heavy haul freight trains and container trains from that of not-so-fast passenger trains, long-distance mail/express trains and commuter trains.

Separate and dedicated freight corridors must be constructed with the capability of carrying 30-tonne axle load wagons at a speed of 100km/h in train formation of over 14,000 tonnes (present trains loads are about 4800 tonnes) to be hauled by multiple units of 4,000 to 6,000 HP modern freight locomotives.

This option, if seriously pursued and implemented, will, in addition to enhancing transport capacity for freight traffic, dramatically bring down the cost of transportation and power tariff and improve the competitive edge of our iron ore exports.

It is possible to identify certain routes for the dedicated freight movement such as iron ore mines to steel plants, collieries to powerhouses, and ports to inland container depots.

True, the dedicated freight corridors cannot be achieved overnight. But a beginning has to be made somewhere. Once the concept is accepted, it may not be that difficult a task to undertake the survey and determine the specific routes and alignments.

According to one estimate, a dedicated freight train network of 9,000 km at a cost of Rs 5 crore per km can be built over five-seven years. Transferring funds from projects, earlier sanctioned on political expediency but not implemented yet and now considered redundant, can part-finance the estimated investments.

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