The Railways will build 1000-km of boundary walls over the next five to six months in some sections of its network that are prone to cattle being run over by trains, the Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, said on Wednesday.
The decision to build boundary wall also come in the backdrop of Vande Bharat trains being damaged by stray cattle on tracks. Official data shows, over 200 trains were affected by cattle straying on to tracks in the first nine days of October and some 4,000-odd trains have been affected in 2022.
According to the minister, two designs were looked into and “one which has a sturdier wall” has been recently approved. Conventional boundary walls will not prevent the problem of cattle being hit but may affect the life of villagers in the area..
“We are working on building these new design boundary walls. Over the next five to six months, we plan to build 1,000 km of such walls across sections to determine if the design works,” he told reporters during a media conference..
Reportedly, some of the stretches identified for building boundary walls include sections in North Central Railways and Northern Railways. The Northern Railways zone reportedly has recorded the highest number of cattle hit cases across divisions of Moradabad and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, Firozpur in Punjab, Ambala in Haryana, and Delhi in 2022, officials said.