The Hindu Business Line : Rlys seeks US co help to study impact of axle load increase

New Delhi, Aug 2 Indian Railways is taking help from US railroad research body Transport Technology Centre Inc (TTCI) to study the impact of moving higher axle load traffic on the tracks.

Admitting that the train tracks did get damaged because of higher axle load plying on them, Mr JP Batra, the former Railway Board Chairman, said that Railways had increased its track monitoring mechanism to ensure safety is not compromised.

During the last three years, in order to tap the huge demand for moving goods, the Railways allowed higher loadings in wagons by increasing the per axle load from about 20 tonnes to 22.9 tonnes on certain heavy haul routes.

Though the Railways has not estimated the extent by which their expenditure on maintenance increased, Mr Batra said that TTCI is helping Indian Railways study the exact impact of increase in axle load. All the railways worldwide including Australian, American, South African and Russian Railways have adopted similar methods to migrate to higher axle load traffic, he said.

The Railways took several steps to ensure safety was not compromised, said Mr Batra, who is likely to join as the Director of International Railways Strategic Management Institute to be set up in Delhi.

“We started grinding the rails to smoothen them as the rail edges were wearing off faster, additional monitoring of bridges was undertaken as they were under stress, ultrasonic testing was used as the rail joints were more likely to give up,” he said.

IT spending

It is likely to spend about three per cent of its total budget on information technology (IT) during the XI Plan period, he said. “As a part of this, in the current fiscal all railway officers would be given laptops. In the next fiscal, all supervisors are likely to be provided laptops that would be linked to the internal systems,” said Mr Batra.

He added that one project he would have preferred to take up in a faster manner was the feasibility study of high speed passenger rail corridor. To tap the growing upper middle class segment, the Railways has to build the high speed passenger corridor very soon.