Safety lights were missing in Frontier Mail

Another safety system that’s trapped in files is the emergency siren system, first proposed in 1993 when the Railways suggested a technology upgrade. “We experimented with it,” says a Railway Board official, “but it as never taken seriously.”

Thursday’s accident occurred because three coaches of the Mumbai-Amritsar Golden Temple Mail decoupled and fell on the adjacent tracks. Railway Board officials say the faultcould have been with the tracks, or with the coaches or the way coaches were attached.

Yet another recommendation, hanging fire for over five years, is the phasing out of old mechanically connected coaches. Member, Railway Board (Traffic) Shanti Narayan, in charge of safety, said that tubular integrated coaches were being brought in to replace the old mechanically attached ones — the kind used in the Golden Temple Mail. The tubular integrated type of coaches would not have de-coupled and derailed, he said. However, Narayan says he does not know how long it will take to phase out these old coaches. “It all depends on the availability of finance,” he said.

Railway Board officials say that not much effort has gone into “decongesting” the railway lines. “There are 160 trains running on a line meant for not more than 60 trains per day. If there was some more time gap between the crossing of two trains, things might have been different.” But when train services are introduced by successive RailwayMinisters for political reasons than anything else, officials say decongestion is virtually impossible.

Railway Minister Nitish Kumar had recently told The Indian Express that safety was his top priority. And that “calibrated input of technology” would go a long way in making rail travel safer. This includes phasing out of old coaches, track renewals and modern signalling systems.

Three months ago, the government set up an eight-member committee headed by retired Justice H R Khanna to go into railway safety. According to member C L Kaw, retired chairman of Railway Board, the committee will review details of accidents since 1978 and work on implementing the recommendations of three previous committees: Kunzru committee in 1962, Wanchoo committee in 1968 and Sikri committee in 1978.

The Khanna committee’s brief: Examine the adequacy of existing organisation, equipment, and suggest measures to prevent accidents; examine safety measures and technology adopted by advanced countries and say what canbe applied here. A tall order, says Kaw. “They have given us six months to file the report but that is next to impossible.”