‘Kavach’ to prevent train accidents soon

The railways has taken up 211 fresh surveys for new rail lines including elevated tracks and corridors spanning over 19,000 km.

New Delhi, Dec 26: Indian Railways has undertaken 211 more surveys for new railway lines across the country, including elevated railway tracks/corridors, having a total length of 19,307 km. Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronic & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, informed the Rajya Sabha in a written reply to a question on Monday.

The minister said that in order to strengthen accident prevention measures, the railways has indigenously developed an automatic train protection system 'Kavach', nicknamed for 'Train Collision Avoidance System', to prevent mishaps due to human error resulting in signal passing at danger and overspeeding.

Vaishnaw further informed the House that the construction of the new elevated tracks and rail corridors has been taken up on a case to case basis depending upon various factors such as site conditions, availability of land, terrain, encroachment along the alignment, density of built up area etc. The height of elevated railway tracks/corridors varies from place to place depending on site conditions, obligatory points etc, he added.

By the end of March this year, the railways had taken up as many as 183 new rail line projects of total length 20,937 km, including elevated railway track/corridor, costing approximately Rs 4 lakh crore. The projects are in different stages of planning/sanction/execution, out of which 2,831 km length has been commissioned and an expenditure of approximately Rs 1.13 lakh crore has been incurred on these projects.

The details of the projects as given by the minister are as follows: Dumdum to Belgachia (1.1 km), Dakshineswar to Dumdum (6.38 km) and Mahanayak Uttam Kumar to Kavi Subash (8.16 km). The above projects are carried out over a total length of 15.64 km, including parts of North-South Corridors.

Similarly, the East-West Corridors (Salt Lake Section-V to Salt Lake Stadium) alone covers 5.8 km, the minister informed the House.