New rail system at Old Delhi station

NEW DELHI, February 4: The rail route interlocking system at the Old Delhi railway station will be upgraded over the weekend. A new route...

NEW DELHI, February 4: The rail route interlocking system at the Old Delhi railway station will be upgraded over the weekend. A new route relay interlocking system will be installed in record time two days February 6 and 7. While a team of 40 officers and 700 workmen install the system, a few trains will be diverted and some will be partially cancelled.

8220;Keeping passenger inconvenience in mind, we are installing this system in record time,8221; says S.P. Mehta, general manager of Northern Railways. 8220;The largest route relay interlocking system will be installed within 48 hours.8221;

This new system will mean better, faster interlocking with very little possibility of human error. Once it is operational, the number of routes possible routes a train could take at the station will increase from 530 at present to 1122. The system will enable quicker clearance of signals, computerised monitoring of the various functions in the yard and alternate paths to the trains. It will also mean a reduction in waiting time for trains on the Delhi-Shahdara route by increasing the holding capacity between the Yamuna bridge and the platform.

To ensure that the system is installed in the stipulated time, the railways have already done a lot of the groundwork. What would have normally taken 25-45 days to install will now be done in two days because the basic requirements of the system have already been installed.

The last overhaul of this interlocking system was done in 1968. 8220;The old system had really deteriorated and the patching up we were doing to keep the system going could not continue,8221; explains Mehta. 8220;These systems are operational for 20-odd years and this one was used for much longer. Moreover, the spare parts of the old system are no longer available.8221;

The system being installed at the Old Delhi railway station is the same as the one at the New Delhi station, which has been operational since last year. The Ghaziabad route relay interlocking system was also commissioned last year. Once the Old Delhi system begins functioning, the Northern Railways would have commissioned 1741 route relay interlock systems in a year.