The work of fitting these doors will be done at WR's Mahalaxmi workshop as per the tender specifications, and officials said the work could take anything between 3-4 months once it is started.
Western Railway will give another shot at having automatic closed doors for its suburban local trains. It has floated a tender totaling Rs1.29 crore to fit 22 automatic closed doors in three coaches of a local train. The work is expected to begin post monsoon once the winner is finalised in the last week of August, said WR officials. The tender for such automatic doors has already failed once as none of the bidders could measure up to the technical specifications of the railways, said officials.
The work of fitting these doors will be done at WR's Mahalaxmi workshop as per the tender specifications, and officials said the work could take anything between 3-4 months once it is started.
On March 13 last year WR had commissioned the first such coach with semi-automatic doors, but the experiment soon fizzled out. It was coach 2274A, a first-class ladies coach. "It was mechanically operated and had some issues because of which the closing mechanism wasn't as smooth as was expected. It had to be discontinued," confirmed Ravinder Bhaker, chief spokesperson, WR.
The system tried out in March last year had a mechanism that could be controlled from the guard's cab and it was the guard's duty to operate the door with the help of two separate set of push buttons provided.
"There was also an Emergency Egress Device (EED) inside the coach in sealed enclosure which could be operated to open the door from inside in case of emergency. One EED was also provided outside the coach in the underframe to open the door from outside in case of any emergency," explained an official.
One worked against this mechanism, pointed out officials. "In case the doors are open in a running train due to any reason, emergency brake application will take place and the train will stop. The mechanism has to be then isolated from the guard's cabin and has to be physically locked and then has to be attended in the car shed. All this takes time and this mechanism had the potential to derail punctuality of the train and the ones following it. That is not desirable in a city like Mumbai," said an official.
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