Whither Indian Railway?

Earlier we used to to have a few dedicated engineers with vision on future and truly struggled with single point concentration passionately think and evolve the strategy for the capital intensive track modernisation and renewals in time so that we do not face spate of accidents stretching the infrastructure to its failure limits.

But in spite of such efforts, finally the system had to go through very painful anguished time of a spate of accidents, punishment to a number of good people too, before wisdom prevailed and the infrastructure revived.

A period of peace many enjoyed. Now the phase of looking ahead and planning for what next is due to be done in next decade is arising. Traffic densities have almost doubled, and we cannot afford to cripple the system, dropping the traffic for the sake of infrasrtucture renewal and up-gradation.

A holistic plan must be drawn out particularly factoring in new realities of social milieu.

The usual turf wars, myopic short term goal oriented pass the day attitudes at policy making levels too have to be factored in.

The intrinsic strength of bridges have carried us this far. I am now worried the complacency set in because of that, left many thousands of bridges in service, much beyond their safe service life.


A combination of bridge and track failures will finish off the financials of railways dropping traffic carried to less than 30% of current levels and hurt national economy too.

Coming two decades will be very painful period not only for the track engineers but also the traffic department, I can foresee.

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