Railway technology mission rolls out

The railway technology mission, started about three years back, has started delivering results.

In a pilot demonstration at Ajgain station on the Lucknow-Kanpur rail track about 30 km from Kanpur, two products, viz Wheel Impact Load Detection (Wild) Instrumentation System and Satellite Imaging for Rail Navigation( SIMRAN) were demonstrated.

Both were successful. This is the way to develop technology in India, said PN Vyas of IIT Kanpur, who along with Raghu Ram, is overseeing the research part of the project.

He said the collaboration between the academia, government orgnisations and the private sector was the model form of organisation through which technology could be developed in India.The two products stated above conclusively proved it again.

"Developing one's own technology not only is more economical, but thorough this, we can also bring about desired changes at our will. In both these projects, the private sector partner TCS will be joining in later," he said.

Wild, a product of collaboration between the IIT-K and RDSO, Lucknow, is a prototype-automated system for detection of wheel flats beyond a certain size. Wheel flats are formed on the wheel tread due to unintentional sliding of wheel on tracks. Isolated wheel flats cause severe damage impact on track, causing severe damage to it.

The package developed has an online data acquisition and display over12 channels. It counts the number of wheels passed, the total number of wheels with flats, defective wheel numbers, wheel speed at the time of detection, and impact load magnitude. An audio and visual alarm is sounded on flat detection.

Sensors known as strain gauge are installed in the rail track and once the rail passes over that portion, all the data required given above are recorded and transmitted to the screen installed in a nearby room, from where it is transmitted to the RDSO headquarters in Lucknow.All this takes place in minutes.

When the train passes, the whole process can be seen on the screen.

The world has these systems but there is none, which gives so much of data through this device, claims Prof.Neelakshya Vyas, IITK, the man behind and co- in charge of the project along with Alok Kumar of RDSO.

Vyas says that the project cost is of Rs.15 lacs at a maximum, although the system developed has Cost as low as Rs.8 lacs. Four years back, The Railways wanted to import it and the cost quoted was Rs.75 lacs a system, which it found prohibitive.

Alok Kumar told journalists that in the Railway plan 260 such systems are to be installed in the next ten years. We have already placed orders for 4 of them, at a cost of Rs.80 lakhs.

SIMRAN is capable of giving information of the train arrival time, at station; train departure time, from station; Train passing time from a station; current position of train, between two stations, which updates it at interval of 1 min. using Heart "�Beating protocol; speed of the train. This was shown at Ajgain station on graphics where a dot was actually moving on the screen.

According to Dr.BM Shukla, of IIT-K, All this is made possible through geo- positioning system, GPS, and Global Mobile System, GMS and Radio Frequency, RF, instrumentation.