After the Balasore train accident tragedy that left 288 dead and over a thousand injured, the Railway Board has instructed all Divisional Railway Managers (DRMs) to restart daily evening planning of maintenance works to be undertaken on blocks for the next day and conduct more reviews.
“This has to be a planned system in our daily regimen. Planning is somewhere lacking and ad hocism has crept into the system,” a senior railway official said. The official was a part of the high-level safety meeting that followed the June 2 incident.
The official further said that there used to be an old system where maintenance teams used to issue their movement programme well in advance. “This should be ensured. All departments should have such a system and collate their activities into a maintenance block period,” the official said.
In the railway system, the entire railway line is divided into convenient ‘block’ sections of 5 to 10 km.
The ongoing probe into the accident indicates that the block through which the Chennai-bound Coromandel Express was supposed to pass had been under maintenance, and that the signalling technician may have resorted to a shortcut in a bid to let the train pass, rather than follow due process of signalling. “When maintenance works are undertaken, automatic signalling is stopped and manual takeover of the system happens. There is a possibility that if the manual inputs are wrongly fed during the maintenance work by a railway staffer, the system will not be able to detect if signal and the track point (movable rails which guide the wheels to different tracks) are in the same direction,” another senior railway official told The Hindu.
The official added that even as the automatic system is programmed to fail on the safer side, issues of manual safety pose a problem. “Hence, nothing is fail-safe and should not be considered so,” the official said.
In the case of the accident, even as the signal was green, the point was set on a wrong line and the train allegedly entered the loop line to crash into a stationary goods freight train. The official said that logs of maintenance work undertaken manually may not be maintained or recorded to a T and at times communication between station master and signalling technician may be missing. Hence the railway board has emphasised on not taking shortcuts.
“Tendency to hide failures will not help anybody, failures should be properly logged and reviewed. Increased number of failures should not stop people from not logging it,” the official said.
