Indian Railways' novel initiative: Track trains in real time with GPS

Railway minister Piyush Goyal has asked all 16 railway zones in India to adopt the new system.

In a bid to provide accurate information to the passengers about the train timings, the Indian Railways would soon launch a service wherein the train movements could be tracked on a real-time basis.

The locomotives would be fitted with a GPS enabled a device that would relay information to the passengers on train's exact location. This would greatly reduce the inconvenience of arriving at the platform and then finding that trains would come late.

The new system, called real-time punctuality monitoring and analysis (RPMA), would be first introduced on the Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Mumbai routes by February-end. Railway minister Piyush Goyal has asked all 16 railway zones in India to adopt the new system.

The new system was tested in October this year in the Mughalsarai division and the experiment was said to be a success.

RPMA system is going to be significantly faster than the existing system, the national train inquiry system (NTES), to update information on the late running of trains. The existing system is based on the manual entry by the station master when the train passes a particular station. The station master's entry is conveyed to the NTES which then gets reflected on screens at the concerned railway stations.

OneIndia News