Railways, SAIL to spar over rails quality after study flags safety issues

A study has said the rails Steel Authority of India (SAIL) provides to the Indian Railways are of lower quality and not suitable to run 25-tonne axle load wagons, dealing a huge blow to an ambitious plan of the Railways to move 70 per cent of its freight traffic on higher axle load wagons by 2019-20.

The finding of the University of Illinois study, which was commissioned by the railways ministry, is likely to lead to a tussle between SAIL and its largest customer, the Railways, as sources indicate that the state-run steel major is unlikely to immediately shift to a top-grade rail.

According to the report, the existing track structure in India, having 880 mega pascal (MPa) tensile strength, is “not adequate” for 25-tonne axle load operations.

“This should ideally be 1080 MPa rail required to run higher axle load wagons compared to the existing 22.9-tonne axle load ones,” said a source close to the development.

According to sources, the Railways has asked the Ministry of Steel and SAIL to shift to higher grade rail in the next two years, so that it can go ahead with the “Mission 25 Tonne” plan. Under the plan, the national transporter was targeting movement of 70 per cent of freight traffic on high axle load wagons by 2019-20.

Axle load is defined as the load of a vehicle applied through the wheels at both ends of an axle and equaling twice the wheel load. SAIL did not respond to emailed questions. However, a senior SAIL official, who did not want to be quoted, said the company was not aware of the report and the rails it is producing is according to Railways’ specifications.

The report by the Transportation Technology Transfer (TTT) team of the University of Illinois also added that as a point of comparison, the Railways’ current 880-MPa rail is of lower strength than even the standard grade used in the United States.

And since Railways uses the same infrastructure for both passenger and freight trains, it is important to use higher-grade rails from the point of view of safety and reliability, it added.

The TTT is recommending the use of higher-strength rails. The university was entrusted with the task of coming up with a report after a study by the Research Designs & Standards Organisation, a research arm of the Indian Railways, found similar results.

SAIL officials said though there was a meeting between the Railways and SAIL last week, nothing other than the volume that it was supposed to provide for the current financial year came up for discussion.

The requirement of rail over the past few years has increased after massive infrastructure development related to track renewal in the Railways under the first tenure of the Modi government.

In the meeting last week, it was indicated that of the requirement of 1.7 million tonne of rails during the current financial year, SAIL has agreed to supply 1.35 million tonne.

“SAIL has not been intimated about the change in requirement. We have kept on changing the requirement based on requirement by our consumers,” the company official added.