Plea to revamp railway bridges

By Our Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, JULY 8. With the Kadalundi disaster casting doubts in the public mind about the safety of old railway bridges, a programme for rehabilitation of substandard and distressed bridges should be implemented without delay, the former chairman of the Railway Board, Mr. M. N. Prasad, said here today.

Also, the inspection of under-water portions of all bridge structures should be made more effective by adopting modern equipment, including proper diving kit, he said, while presenting a paper at a discussion on Railway Safety, organised by Prathikarana Vedi here.

About 84.5 per cent of the rail accidents have been found to have been caused by human failures, 66 per cent of which was attributed to the negligence of railway staff, he said.

The failure of equipment - track, vehicles or signalling system - contributed to a mere 8 per cent of the total accidents. However, it was to the Railways' credit that the incidence of rail accidents per million train-km, which was as high as 2.2 per cent in `81-82 had been brought down to 0.64 per cent by 1999.

Bridges are systematically maintained and inspected and have seldom contributed to rail accidents. In fact, the Kadalundi accident, the cause of which was still being inquired into, was the first in his memory when a defective bridge was found to be the cause of an accident, Mr. Prasad, said.

However, the public as well as the media, who are generally complacent about the unsafe condition of roads and the violation of traffic rules, were `over-reacting' about the rail safety, he felt. Every rail accident was inquired into and appropriate remedial or preventive action taken, including stringent measures against any negligent official. This could not be said in the case of road traffic.

In 1999-2000, when 338 passengers died and 716 left injured in rail accidents in the country, in Kerala alone, 2,590 people were killed and 47,860 persons injured in road accidents.

Zooming in on the problem areas of Railways, Mr. Prasad pointed out that track renewals had fallen heavily into arrears during the past 10 years, due to which the incidence of in-service failure of rails has risen alarmingly. Unless the backlog was cleared, it would become difficult to cope with the task of timely detection and replacement of such rails.

Derailments mostly feature freight trains which are mainly run on routes having double or multiple lines and cause obstructions. With the high frequency of trains on busy routes, an electronic warning system to protect trains from running into such obstructions would be more effective, he said.

Safe maintenance of coaches and wagons, with adequate supply of spare coaches and the essential carriage and wagon components for prompt repairs should receive priority over the introduction of new trains, Mr. Prasad said.

The railway system, both infrastructure and rolling stock was presently under tremendous strain for want of inputs to cope with the demands of rail traffic. He pointed out that while there had been a seven-fold increase in traffic in the period from 1951 to 2000, this was achieved by the over-utilisation of line capacity and more intensive use of the rolling stock. This had placed increased responsibilities on the maintenance and operation staff.

Also, in the past 10 years, the Railways had made huge investments in uniguage projects and other unproductive schemes due to political compulsions. This had resulted in a drastic reduction in budgetary allocations for capacity augmentation as well as replacement of old assets, he pointed out.

Those who participated in the discussion included Mr. T. N. Jayachandran, the Director of ADIC (India), Mr. Johnson Edayaranmula and the CPI(M) leader, Mr. M. A. Baby, among others.

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