The Hindu Business Line : East Coast Rly mulls placing fewer rakes at Vizag port

Kolkata March 14 East Coast Railway (ECoR), with headquarter in Bhubaneswar, is to shortly write to the Ministry of Agriculture inquiring if any more wheat vessel is to be nominated for Visakhapatnam port. This is because the vessels with imported wheat have stopped calling at Visakhapatnam port since February.

"If the Ministry decides not to nominate any more wheat vessel for Visakhapatnam port, we can divert the rakes, so far placed at the port for wheat loading, to some other locations to facilitate loading of other cargoes and this being the busy season there is so much of demand for rakes," a spokesman for ECoR told Business Line over phone from Bhubaneswar.

Since November, ECoR, as it was pointed out, had been placing six rakes a day on an average at Visakhapatnam port to facilitate loading of both imported wheat and finished fertilisers. Between April and January 2006-07, the port handled six lakh tonnes of imported wheat against nil in 2005-06 and between April and so far in the current month 2.58 million tonnes of finished fertilisers as compared to 2.26 mt in the same period of last year.

"We're still placing five to six rakes day at the port, mainly for loading fertilisers but the throughputs are coming down," said the spokesman. While there had been no wheat vessels since February, the throughputs of the finished fertilisers so far this month had been around 3,000 tonnes from 1.3 lakh tonnes in February. "We now have in hand indents for 19 rakes for loading fertilisers and we can complete loading these rakes in three to four days," he observed.

When asked if the placing of fewer rakes at the port wouldn't affect the back-loading of imported cargoes such as coking coal and other items, the spokesman said that EcoR had been regularly placing 10 rakes a day on an average for back-loading and the port was not equipped to load more than 10 rakes a day. "There is only one railway line capable of accommodating full rake and the line is used mainly for loading imported coal," he added.