TRICHY:
Around
10,000 km of railway tracks across the country are sitting on a recipe for
disaster, quite literally, as the ballast - the small, coarse stones that act
as shock absorbers - have only a third of the mandated thickness.
A high-level meeting presided over by Ashwani Lohani, chairman of the Railway Board, with general managers of all 17 zones on November 27, discussed the issue of the thinning down of ballast in light of the derailment of the Vasco da Gama-Patna Express on November 24.
A high-level meeting presided over by Ashwani Lohani, chairman of the Railway Board, with general managers of all 17 zones on November 27, discussed the issue of the thinning down of ballast in light of the derailment of the Vasco da Gama-Patna Express on November 24.
Thirteen coaches
went off the rails in that accident, which left three people dead and nine
injured.
"About 10,000 km track on IR has clean ballast cushion less than 100 mm. Deep screening of these stretches should be dealt on priority and liquidated within a year," the minutes of the meeting read, directing all general managers to take the action required. According to railway standards, layers of ballast must have a thickness of at least 300mm.
Apart from poor maintenance and a staff crunch, shortage of ballast cleaning machines was cited as a major reason for deficiency of the ballasts.
Ballast acts as a cushion and absorbs the vibrations, ensuring the safety of trains on a railway track. The loads from the wheels of trains ultimately come on the ballast through rails and sleepers, with the thickness of the ballast sheet under the track decreasing over a period of time.
The thickness can be brought back by manual packing or mechanical tamping, one of the key maintenance works for the civil engineering department of the railways. As a convention, this standardisation is done once in 10 years on heavy traffic lines, said a top railway official.
Ballast deficiency is one of the root causes for weld failure, rail fracture, break in a fish plate or loosening of bolt and nut and track alignment variation, said D Manoharan, deputy general secretary of Dakshin Railway Employees Union, affiliated to the CPI(M). "It could lead to derailment or fatal accidents. When accidents occur, authorities focus only on the renewal of tracks and other related issues, but unfortunately, they don't look at the importance of maintaining ballast," he said.
When contacted, a senior official from the office of the chief track engineer in Southern Railway said that over a period of time, the ballast composition would get diluted with mud and vegetation.
"The thickness of the ballast varies based on the traffic. Ten thousand
kilometres of track facing ballast deficiency shows the overall picture. When
compared to over one lakh track kilometres across the country, this would
hardly come to 10-12%," he said.
However, the deficiency should definitely be liquidated and the ballast should
also be maintained as per the parameters, he added.
"These things will not directly contribute to accidents immediately.
Ballast deficiency will directly affect the performance of train movement only
in the long run," the official said.
Source:
