Amnesia on railway tracks

Has the country’s oldest railway network forgotten its engineering skills? It seems so. Repeated last-minute goof-ups in laying tracks and crossovers by Central Railway (CR) engineers has not only put a question mark on the body’s efficiency and work culture but also cost a lot of public money.

Does building an 18-km double rail line take one-and-a-half decades? When the first-ever lines were laid in India in 1853, coincidentally along the same stretch, the task had not taken more than three to four years. Even back then, there were land issues to be sorted out, houses to be relocated, farmlands to be taken over, and court cases to be managed. In spite of all this, the line had reached Kalyan, over a distance of 54km, by 1854.

Nearly 160 years later, however, building an 18-km new corridor along the same stretch is proving to be difficult for present-day rail engineers. Agreed that much of the delay was caused by the state’s dilly-dallying over rehabilitation, but track-laying goof-ups, least expected from qualified rail engineers who run the lifeline of the country’s financial capital, are of much greater concern.

Crucial crossovers, where a train switches tracks, were laid in an erroneous manner, forcing CR to work on the project all over again. Was the body in a hurry to meet the deadline or was it the sheer lack of efficiency that caused the error will always remain a question. However, the goof-ups do question the safety standards and work culture of railway managers. And now work is being done all over again — removing stretches, signals, wires, and re-laying them.

This has not just led to a loss of public money and of man hours but also delayed the opening of a new corridor besides being a loss of face for the country’s pioneering railway that produced India’s first rail engineers like James Berkely and GT Clarke, who visualised and built a rail line from scratch in a country that did not have a rail line.

The project to lay two new lines to segregate suburban and national traffic was first conceived in the 1990s. Track-laying began simultaneously but was punctuated by slums and buildings in the way. The rehabilitation bodies took pretty long and finally, two years ago, all the project-affected people were moved.

When actual rail work re-started two years ago, CR had to remove the lines laid a decade back as they had become outdated. When things were ready by October 2010, a last-minute change in layout near Bhandup led to re-removal of a small stretch and relocating of signals.

In February 2011, when the commissioner of rail safety, an independent authority falling under the ministry of civil aviation, finally inspected the new corridor, he rejected it outright. The CR had goofed up again, this time in laying crossovers.

Mumbaikars need to know who is accountable for the loss of public money. The city needs answers for such negligence on the part of railway managers who take pride in Mumbai postings but fail to deliver. It is time they brushed up their engineering skills.