Indian Railways has successfully executed long pending major maintenance work on bridges and tracks during the lockdown period to improve safety and operational efficiencies.
According to an official release, the backend warriors of Indian Railways executed maintenance works like yard remodelling, renewal of scissors crossover, repairs of bridges during this lockdown, which were pending for a long time and often confronted Indian Railways as bottlenecks.
Around 500 modern heavy duty track maintenance machines along with track, signal and Overhead Equipment (OHE) maintainers worked regularly for 10,749 machine days to complete overdue track maintenance of 12,270 km plain track and 5,263 numbers of turn outs, as per the release.
It further added that health of the track has been monitored through periodic runs of Oscillation Monitoring System (OMS) cumulating 1,92,488 km of track at 5,362 peak locations indicated by OMS test has been attended to ensure proper quality.
The ultrasonic flaw detection (USFD) of 30,182 km of track and 1,34,443 rail welds has been carried out with USFD machine.
Furthermore, critical summer precaution activities like de-stressing of long welded rail (LWR) which involved huge man power has been taken up with a new procedure for carrying out the work with ensuring adequate social distancing norms. 2,246 km of de-stressing of LWR has been done.
Indian Railways planned these works during lockdown period considering it as a 'once in a lifetime opportunity' to wipe out these maintenance arrears and take up the execution of work without affecting the train service.
( With inputs from ANI )