Reply in Parliament: Maintenance of Railway Tracks
New Delhi: Safety is accorded the highest priority by Indian Railways and all possible steps are undertaken on a continual basis to prevent accidents and to enhance safety. These include timely replacement of over-aged assets, adoption of suitable technologies for upgradation and maintenance of track, rolling stock, signaling and interlocking systems, safety drives, greater emphasis on training of officials and safety inspections at regular intervals to monitor and educate staff for the observance of safe practices.
The Railways’ Capital Outlay has been fixed at Rs. 1,20,000 crore in Revised Estimate 2017-18, which is Rs. 10,065 crore higher than Actual Expenditure 2016-17 of Rs.1,09,935 crore. To give a fillip to passenger safety, the Government has introduced ‘Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh’ (RRSK) in 2017-18 with a corpus of Rs. 1 lakh crore to be spent over a period of five years, to clear the backlog of renewal/replacement of safe assets.
The Capital Allocation of 2017-18 also includes Rs. 20,000 crore under ‘Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh’ (RRSK) to be spent on identified works under plan heads Track Renewals, Bridge Works, Signalling and Telecommunication Works, Road Safety Works of Level Crossings and Road Over/Under Bridges, Rolling Stock, Traffic Facilities, Electrical Works, Machinery and Plant, Workshops, Passenger Amenities, and Training.
Inspection of Railway Track is done as per Indian Railway Permanent Way (IRPW) Manual, which requires Inspection of the track by mechanized means, supplemented by detailed manual inspection to ensure safety. Induction of state of the art technology is a continuous process. Induction of various state of the art technology for monitoring and inspection of rail tracks have been considered, such as Integrated Track recording Cars (TRCs), Ground Penetration Radar, Axle Box Mounted Accelerometers, Component Monitoring system and Vehicular Ultra Sonic Flaw Detection (USFD). Maintenance of track is done with fleets of state of the art track maintenance machines deployed over different Zonal Railways.
This information was given by the Minister of State of Railways Rajen Gohain in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today on 21.03.2018.
Source: PIB