The onset of winter across the northern parts of India entails extra precautions to be taken for safe train operations. During winter railway tracks tend to expand during daytime and contract during the night with sudden change in temperature resulting in cases of rail fractures.
Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) has put in place several safety measures which include vigorous patrolling across its entire track length with special emphasis on fracture prone locations.
Normally rail fractures happen during night or early morning hours when the temperature is low.
How it is done
NFR’s patrolmen do night patrolling detecting these flaws on tracks in harsh weather conditions.
Rail joints and welds are monitored regularly to identify any discrepancy. Maximum and minimum temperature of the defect prone areas are being monitored. These are then compared with the available records of last five years to find out the Mean Rail Temperature to check the possibility of rail fracture owing to temperature variation.
De-stressing of the sections having LWR (Long Welded Rails) is also being done. Switch expansion joints (SEJ) are being monitored during that time of the day when the temperature is on the lower side to find out any change in behaviour of rails.
Ultrasonic Fault Detection (USFD) device is also being used to detect defect or fracture which are not normally visible to naked eye.
The Trackmen, Patrolmen and Keymen are equipped with rechargeable torch, fog signal, two tri-colour hand signal lamps, three flags (two red and one green), gum boots, protective cliothing and safetty jackets besides GPS trackers.
They being suitably counselled and trained to detect and take proactive measures. Necessary equipments are also being provided to field staff on winter patrolling duty.
Foggy weather during winters results in poor visibility for loco pilots.
NFR has re-painted indication and barrier gates besides providing with luminous indication strips for proper visibility wherever required.