The Carriage Repair Workshop of East Coast Railway (ECoR) in the city has chalked out Rs 25 crore expansion plan which will take the coach overhauling capacity of the workshop from 100 coaches to 150 coaches per month.
Railway Board has already sanctioned the project and it is scheduled to be completed by 2013-14.
ECoR, meanwhile, is coordinating with Central Organisation for Modernisation of Workshop (Cofmow) for procurement of machines and the civil construction for the project is expected to start soon.
After the capacity expansion, the workshop will not only meet the requirement of periodical overhauling (POH) of coaches in ECoR zone, but also have spare capacity to cater to the need of other zones like South East Central Railway and East Central Railway, said S.K. Pankaj, Chief Workshop Manager, ECoR.
The total passenger coach holding of ECoR is estimated at 1895 which included 287 AC coaches and 1608 non-AC coaches. The total number of coaches in the zone is expected to go up to 2,100 over the next three years when the expanded capacity will come into operation.
The average age of coaches held by the zone is approx. 10 years as against the coach life of 25 years fixed by the Indian Railway.
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The Carriage Repair Worksop in Bhubaneswar is spread over 314 acres which includes 121 acres of workshop area. It achieved an out turn of 1300 coaches in 2009-10, which is a marginal growth over the outturn of 1286 coaches in 2008-09.
Meanwhile, the cycle time of coach overhauling (traffic in to traffic out) at the workshop has been brought down by half over the past one year due to intense monitoring.
Similarly, the workshop has switched over to 18 month periodicity of POH attention from that of 12 months from November last year and this has improved the availability of coaches for train operation.
The workshop also undertook complete refurbishment of 24 coaches during the last fiscal as a result of which there has been a quantum improvement in their condition. The scope of refurbishment work includes extensive corrosion repair, complete replacement of PVC flooring, laminated plastic sheet panels, seat covering and seat cushions.
Pankaj said, the workshop gnerated 800 tonnes of scrap per annum of which 400 tonnes comprising wheels and axles are sent to the Rail Wheel factory at Bangalore for recycling while the rest 400 tonnes of wheel turnings and borings are sold in the market.