Railways to reassess fire-retardant materials used in coaches

Jolted by two fire mishaps on trains within a fortnight, the Railways has finally decided to reassess the quality of fire-retardant materials it uses for interiors of coaches and also recheck electrical fittings of its entire rolling stock for “technical lacunae”.
Sources said the decision comes after the high number of casualties in recent fire incidents, including those in 2012, raising questions at several levels within the Railways about either the standards prescribed for the materials by Railways’ research wing or the efficacy of the actual materials supplied to coach factories by private vendors.
“We will pick up samples of the materials and subject them to re-test. This is to see if they are following the prescribed norms for the materials,” Arunendra Kumar, Chairman, Railway Board, told The Indian Express on Wednesday.
But as far as detecting fire is concerned, the Railways conceded that it can only happen at random. “We can only do such detection at random,” Kumar said. “Once we tried checking every passenger’s luggage for inflammable materials, but the queues went longer and longer making it impossible to carry out such an operation.”
A technology to automatically detect fire in AC coaches and sound an alarm is still on trial. Manual checking on board or at stations has also been suffering with the Railways unable to fill over 17,000 vacancies in its security agency, the RPF.
On an average, two people have either been killed or injured every day for the past 10 years in train accidents in India. Each year, an average 728 people have been victims of accidents in the Railways including 255 getting killed in the past 10-odd years.
Around 26 per cent of all deaths in train accidents have happened due to fire last year even though fire incidents made only around 5.75 per cent of all accidents.
The re-testing of the fire-retardant materials will be done at the coach factories where they are used. Upholstery, curtains and other fittings for the coaches were made fire retardant a few years ago with the claim that they slow down the spread of fire and emit less toxic fumes while burning thereby reducing chances of asphyxiation. But most of the fire deaths inside coaches have happened due to asphyxiation.