Focus on safety of driverless trains
Focusing on indegenisation and world class safety measures, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is gearing up to make a transition to the driverless train operations on its upcoming corridors under its phase III expansion network.
“For driverless trains, the Delhi Metro has put a slew of safety features including fitting of fire alarms to detect sparks well ahead of a full blown fire, track camera to detect breakage, obstruction detection equipments and improved communication between passengers and operation control room,” said DMRC executive director Sudhanshu Shekhar Joshi.
The driverless metro trains will operate on under-construction corridors 7 and 8 and DMRC is procuring 504 RS 10 coaches and trailer plus motor units out of which 384 will be manufactured by the public sector enterprise BEML, which is a sub-contractor of South Korean company Rotem, Anuj Dayal, spokesperson of DMRC said. Although, the Metro trains are designed in a way that there is no scope or fire or if it happens it does not spread, yet the fire detectors will be fitted with RS 10 coaches as further precaution. Advanced obstruction detection equipments in the coaches and blocking the obstruction at the platform level itself are some other measures that the Corporation is taking.
Round the clock monitoring of tracks through cameras and increased inspections will be in place to prevent accidents due to rail fractures. OHE photography, obstruction detection devices, screen doors on platforms, dedicated bandwidth for wifi communication between train passengers and operation control room, deployment of attendants inside trains will be other safety features of the driverless trains, said a senior DMRC official.
The Bharat Earth Movers Ltd (BEML), which manufactures Metro coaches and trailer plus motor units, has been sourcing locally thereby reducing its dependence on exports. Almost 70 percent of a Metro coach is indigenous with BEML emphasising on local sourcing and except for a few criticial aggregates, most of the things are manufactured or sourced locally.