Indian Railways - The lifeline of common people



In FY19, Indian Railways carried 1.157 trillion passenger-km. This makes it the busiest railway system in the World. In 2019, IR carried 8.44 billion Railway passengers, more than anywhere in the World. In FY18, Indian Railways carried 1.16 billion MT of freight, which is 4th highest in the World. To make Indian freight transport more efficient Govt. is making "Dedicated Freight Corridor". In short, 13452 passenger trains and 9141 freight trains plying 23 million travelers and 3 million tons of freight daily. As of March 2019, Indian Railways' Rolling Stock consists 289 thousand freight wagons, 74 thousand passenger coaches and 12 thousand locomotive engines.

Indian Railways track length over years-


In terms of revenue, Indian Railways is at 4th position with a net revenue of US$ 28.8 billion (2018). Germany's Deutsche Bahn is at top with net revenue of US$ 51.14 billion (2018).
India's current Railway electrification is at 39866 km (FY20) which doubled from 19854 km in FY12. Central Organisation For Railway Electrification (CORE) is performing this electrification work.

"Project Unigauge", started in April 1, 1992, is an ongoing effort by Indian Railways to convert and unify entire Railway network to Indian Standard Broad Gauge of 1,676 mm (5ft 6in). Back in 1947, India had just 25170 km of Broad Gauge. As of Mar 2020, out of 67415 km of network, 63391 km (94.03%) is broad gauge. Majority of pending work is in Western Railways.

The railway factories in India are -
  1. Integral Coach Factory, Chennai
  2. Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala
  3. Modern Coach Factory, Rae Bareli
  4. Rail Wheel Factory, Bengaluru
  5. Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, Chittaranjan
  6. Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi
  7. Diesel Loco Modernisation Works, Patiala
Indian Railway for passenger transportation is making only LHB coaches. Vande Bharat Express (in above picture) is unveiled recently by ICF, Chennai. Indian railways alongside Alstom has unveiled 12000 HP WAG-12 loco for highspeed freight traction. In the Mass Rapid Transit system, commonly known as MRT or Metro, India currently has 2nd most no. of cities with an operating Metro railway Network after China. Indian Metro by Nov 2020 reached 680 km in 13 cities which grew from just 4 cities (258 km) in May 2014.




Metro Systems in India
  1. Kolkata - 2 Oct 1984
  2. Delhi - 24 Dec 2002
  3. Bengaluru - 20 Oct 2011
  4. Gurugram - 14 Nov 2013
  5. Mumbai - 8 Jun 2014
  6. Jaipur - 3 Jun 2015
  7. Chennai - 29 Jun 2015
  8. Kochi - 17 Jun 2017
  9. Lucknow - 5 Sep 2017
  10. Hyderabad - 29 Nov 2017
  11. Noida - 25 Jan 2019
  12. Ahmedabad - 6 Mar 2019
  13. Nagpur - 8 Mar 2019
The Metro Coach manufacturers in India are-
  1. BEML (Bharath Earth Movers Limited) - HQ in Bangalore, they had collaboration with Hyundai Rotem for technology transfer and has delivered most no. of Rolling Stocks to Indian Metros.
  2. Bombardier Transportation - Opened manufacturing unit in Savli, Gujarat at 2008. By 2020, they have rolled out 1200 coaches.
  3. Alstom - Opened the manufacturing unit at Sri City in 2015. In Nov 2020, they have produced 500 Metro coaches. Exported 132 cars to Sydney Metro and 36 cars to Montreal Metro.
  4. Titagarh Firema - After acquiring Firema Transporti from Italy, the first few aluminum coaches will be imported from Italy. The rest will be manufactured in Hindmotor near Kolkata for upcoming Pune Metro.
India opened 11 Metro systems in 2010-19 which is 2nd most, after PR China who opened 27 systems in the same span.


Indian PM Narendra Modi and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe laid foundation stone of Bullet Train project on 14th Sep, 2017. 508-km long project cost ₹1.1 lakh crore, Japan is giving a loan of ₹88 thousand crore, at an interest rate of 0.1% to be repaid in 50 years with a 15-year grace period. This high speed rail will connect Mumbai and Ahmedabad, 7-km track will be under sea.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asian Dream - China, Japan and India

Image
Many experts, politicians, scholars believe 21st century is going to be “Asian Century”. To make this a reality 3 countries should come and work together – Soaring Dragon, Rising Elephant and Assertive Godzilla i.e. China, India and Japan. Below are the reasons I would like to mention – 1. Nominal GDP wise top 3 Asian countries are China, Japan and India. In terms of PPP, the order is China, India and Japan. For a rising Asia, these 3 countries should join hands. 2. In terms of Forex Reserve, the Top 3 Asian economies are China (>$3 Trillion), Japan (> $1 Trillion) and India (> $500 Billion). Surprisingly these 3 nations are also top 5 in the World. 3. China, Japan and India also has 6 (JPX, SSE, SEHK, SZSE, BSE, NSE) out of World’s Top 12 biggest Stock exchanges in terms of Market capitalization. Imagine the enormous potential if we create something like Euronext in Asia. 4. China, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan are always featured in top 10 nation Fortune Global 2000 c
Read more

India's Supercomputer Journey

Image
 India's Supercomputer journey is no less than an astounding achievement. In 1987, USA declined when India asked to purchase Supercomputers, developed by CRAY thinking India may develop nuclear weapon from it. The CRAY supercomputer, designated No. 1205 by Cray, was built for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore but it was never delivered. At a conference at CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), in 1987, Rajiv Gandhi was discussing this problem with many renowned Indian scientists. They expressed their discontent on the PM asking other countries to setup India’s supercomputer. DoE established the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with initial investment of Rs 300 million produced PARAM 8000 supercomputer in 1991. Dr. Vijay P. Bhatkar is known as Father of PARAM Series Supercomputer. Indian scientists developed their supercomputer by linking together as many as 256 small, readily available computers in a technique known as massive parallel
Read more

India's preparation for upcoming Tokyo Olympics

Image
 As we are going towards Tokyo Olympic next year, let's see how we performed in Asian and World Championships in 2019. Archery Asian (Bangkok, Thailand) 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 4 Bronze World ('s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands) 0 Gold, 1 Silver, 2 Bronze Athletics Asian (Doha, Qatar) 3 Gold, 7 Silver, 7 Bronze World (Doha, Qatar) 0 Gold, 0 Silver, 0 Bronze (Created 3 new National Records) Badminton Asian (Wuhan, China) 0 Gold, 0 Silver, 0 Bronze World (Basel, Switzerland) 1 Gold, 0 Silver, 1 Bronze Boxing Asian (Bangkok, Thailand) 2 Gold, 4 Silver, 7 Bronze World (Men : Yekaterinburg, Women : Ulan-Ude, Russia) 0 Gold, 2 Silver, 4 Bronze Cycling   (As this is new sport, considering Junior Asian and World Championship performance of Track Cycling. There are also BMX, Mountain and Road Cycling) Asian (Jakarta, Indonesia) 4 Gold, 4 Silver, 2 Bronze World (Frankfurt, Germany) 1 Gold, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze Fencing Asian (Chiba, Japan) 0 Gold, 0 Silver, 0 Bronze
Read more