The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Interlocking system commissioned at Cantonment station

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 20, 2005

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Interlocking system commissioned at Cantonment station

By Our Staff Reporter

The member (Electrical), Indian Railways, S.C. Gupta, commissioning the Solid State Interlocking system at the Cantonment railway station in Bangalore on Saturday. — Photo: K. Murali Kumar

BANGALORE, FEB. 19. Train movement at the Cantonment railway station here will now be controlled by a state-of-the-art Solid State Interlocking (SSI) system, the first of its kind to be commissioned by South Western Railway and the 54th countrywide.

Described as highly safe and reliable, the system will now be a regular feature of signalling and interlocking system upgrading across India.

Used worldwide to control train operations at railway stations and yards, the system replaces the old electro-mechanical signalling arrangements at the Cantonment station where signals and points were hitherto operated by mechanical levers.

Less maintenance

"The system requires less maintenance and fewer people for operation. It also does not occupy more space and consumes less power," according to an official of the city-based Union Switch and Signal, the company that designed the equipment, hardware and software for the system.

"The system is identical to the conventional relay based interlocking in all aspects of operational requirements, in which the station interlocking is achieved by means of solid state equipment instead of electro-mechanical relays," he said.

The system at the Cantonment station will control 23 signals, 12 crossovers, 24 track circuits and 44 routes.

Launching the system on Saturday, the member (Electrical), Indian Railways, S.C. Gupta, said it is a critical application with a lot of built-in safety features.

The new system will be installed at all stations where the old systems have completed their general life of around 25 years, he said. The interlocking signal system at the Bangalore city railway station, however, will operate on the old system.

Mr. Gupta announced an award of Rs. 25,000 for the Bangalore division for having completed the deployment of the system on time.

Warning devices

To arrest the rising incidence of accidents at unmanned railway crossings, the Indian Railways has installed 90 train actuated warning devices across the country. Nine of them are deployed at crossings on the outskirts of Bangalore, according to Mr. Gupta.

Most of the devices have been installed at manned crossings to ascertain their efficacy to alert drivers of vehicles. Introduced on an experimental basis, the devices will eventually be deployed at unmanned crossings, which make up almost half of the 38,000 level-crossings in the country.

The devices feature a hooter and a flashing light to warn road-users about approaching trains. The equipment switches on when the train is about two km away. Designed by a Bangalore-based firm, Gigitronics, the devices are combined with electrically operated lifting barriers at some crossings, including the one at Kengeri, the divisional railway manager, Mahesh Kumar, told presspersons on Saturday.

Accident rate

Refuting reports that rail accidents have gone up, Mr. Gupta clarified that the accident rate has actually come down in recent years. "The level of safety is measured in terms of the number of accidents per million km. For India, the figure is 0.39, which is comparable to international standards," he said.

Indian Railways, he said, constantly trained its employees on safety aspects. "Of the 14 lakh employees, about two lakh are under training at any given time," he explained.

On accidents at level-crossings, Mr. Gupta said although a majority of such accidents are caused because of rash driving of vehicles, the Railways counted them as rail accidents. "The vehicle drivers should give priority to approaching trains. As for cases of driving trains rashly, we monitor over speeding through speed charts," he said.

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