Rlys to stop night trains on metre gauge
PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE The decision, which will affect 73 trains, has been taken to prevent accidents at unmanned level crossings
NEW DELHI: Indian Railways will stop running trains at night on its metre gauge network to prevent accidents at unmanned level crossings, railway officials said on Wednesday, in a decision that comes less than a week after 13 children died when a speeding train ploughed into a school van in Uttar Pradesh.
At least 73 trains will stop running at night because of the move. The state-run transporter also plans to restrict train speeds on the metre gauge network during daytime. Across 1,000 km of metre gauge tracks, India has 1,135 unmanned crossings.
Some of these sections are in Agra, Izzatnagar, Lucknow, Ajmer, Salem, Ratlam and Bhavnagar zone of Indian Railway.
“There are 11 sections across the country where we have metre gauge. The maximum speed on these tracks can be 75 km/hour,” a railway official said on Wednesday, requesting anonymity. “To avoid accidents, we have decided to run trains only during day time and there will be speed restriction during day also to avoid any mishap. We will cancel some trains while some will be diverted.”
On 26 April, 13 schoolchildren were killed and eight injured when 55075 Down, on its way from Siwan to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, smashed into a school van around 7 a.m. at an unmanned crossing in Kushinagar. The driver had earphones plugged in while driving and ignored screams by children that a train was approaching fast, officials said. To be sure, that train was running on broad-gauge tracks.
In broad-gauge, the two tracks are placed at a distance more than 1.76m, while in metre-gauge, the tracks are 1m wide. The distance between the two tracks is 600700m in narrow-gauge.
The railways will shortly announce a date from which trains will stop running on metre gauge tracks at night, the official cited above said.
RK Singh, former chairman of railway board, said: “In metre and narrow gauge, I don’t think there is requirement for spending money on removing unmanned crossing as it is the responsibility of road users to be careful. We need a create a road sense as removal is crossing is not the solution.”
The decision came less than a week after 13 children were killed when the Gorakhpur-siwan passenger train smashed into a school van at one such crossing in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh on April 26.
Of the total 5,792 unmanned level crossing across the country, 3,479 are on the broad gauge section, 1,135 on metre gauge and 1,178 on narrow gauge.
Narrow gauge tracks are mostly in hill areas and the speed of trains that run on them is very low, so the Railways has no plan to eliminate unmanned crossings in such terrain.
Indian Railways is targeting the elimination of unmanned crossing in the broad gauge network by March 2020, but is likely to advance the deadline. Unmanned rail crossing can be eliminated either by installing a barrier and turning it into a manned crossing or by building a flyover for vehicular traffic. A majority of metre gauge tracks are already being converted into broad gauge..
Corridors where high-speed and suburban trains run will have unmanned crossing removed by June this year.
“We have eliminated 1,565 rail crossings in 2017-18, while this year the target is to eliminate 1,500 more. After March 31, 2020, about 400 crossings where one or two trains pass in a day will be left which we will cover later,” Railway Board chairman Ashwani Lohani said after the Kushinagar accident.
Lohani, who was named to helm the world’s fourth-largest rail network in August year last after a spate of accidents led to a top-level shake-up in the railways, said the number of train accidents had come down from 135 in 2014-15 to 73 in 2017-18. Fifty accidents occurred at unmanned level crossings in 2014-15, 29 in 2015-16, 20 in 2016-17 and 10 in 2017-18.
The government is trying to revamp the rail network on which 12,000 trains carry 23 million passengers each day — equivalent to Australia’s entire population.