The Hindu Business Line : Rlys may introduce special wagons to move more payload

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New Delhi Feb. 20 The Indian Railways is likely to announce several throughput enhancing measures for the freight traffic that include special wagons to move more payload, strengthening tracks to add more higher axle load routes, clearing routes for double stack container movement, experimenting with triple stack container movements in domestic sector and double stack container movements in electric traction.

Railways is likely to acquire stainless steel wagons next fiscal, which are lighter and have a higher payload to tare weight ratio, with the aim of increasing the volume of freight that each wagon carries. The wagons will have a payload to tare weight ratio of about 3.4 compared with the wagons in use now, which have a ratio of about 2.7.

LIGHTER WAGONS

The new wagons will help the Railways carry about 1.8 to 2 tonnes of extra freight in each wagon. Thus, the total weight in each rake can go up, depending on the number of wagons attached in a rake.

STRENGTHENED ROUTES

Additionally, several routes, which are already moving wagons with 22.9 and 22.5 tonne axle loads, are likely to be upgraded to move 25 tonne axle load. These would serve as feeder routes for the dedicated freight corridor. Two iron ore and steel routes — Dallirajhara to Bhilai, and Daitari to Banspani — are already being upgraded to move 25 tonne axle load trains.

With several private firms expected to start their container operations, the Railways is also likely to move towards clearing more diesel routes in the western parts of the country to facilitate double stack container movement.

DOUBLE STACK CONTAINERS

Double-stack containers tend to increase the carrying capacity of each train to 2,500 tonnes against 1,500 tonnes, apart from reducing line capacity constraints by 45-48 per cent. The Railways may mention their proposal that envisages moving triple stack containers of smaller sizes on domestic routes.

This would reduce the unit cost of transportation by permitting higher volumes of relatively lightweight and high value cargo such as cars, automobile parts, electronics and electrical components, readymade garments, tea, medicinal items, spices, plastic goods, jute, leather goods, de-oiled cakes and paper, in each rake.

However, this could be implemented in the domestic sector movements only, as, for international trade, there are standard container sizes. Use of these 6.5 by 40 feet containers are expected to improve capacity by about 154 per cent per train compared with the standard use of single stack containers.

In the electrified routes as well, the Railways may also experiment with double stack movements of these smaller sized containers. Such movements are expected to improve the capacity by about 69 per cent when compared with the standard single stack container movements.

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