Electronic interlocking smoothens train mgmt

Neeraj Bagga

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, March 17

The Railways has overcome the problem of prolonged detention of trains to a larger extent after the operationalistaion of the electronic inter-locking system and commissioning of platforms six and seven here in the city.

Amrit Singh, Officiating Director of the Amritsar railway station, says, “On an average, 76 trains arrive to and depart from the local railway station every day. Each trains get 10 minutes on an average to drop and pick passengers. The process consumes around 10 hours per day.

Interlocking is performed manually at two places that are situated at the east and west sides of the railway station. Now, both cabins are abandoned. The manual system requires several officials engaged in checking maps, observing the number of trains parked in the station, noting down their departure and then giving a green signal to an approaching train. Though the entire function is performed in a few minutes, the entire detail needs to be kept on mind to ensure that every train comes on a different track. There is always a chance of human error. Interlocking is an arrangement of signal points and other appliances connected by mechanical and electrical locking so that their operations take place in a proper way to ensure safety. In the electrical or electronic interlocking schemes, signals are worked upon through an integrated mechanism in a signal cabin set up on the platform which features a display of the entire track layout with indication of sections that are occupied, free, set for reception or dispatch and other.

The interlocking is accomplished by electrical circuitry and computerised circuits, he said.

The officiating director added that it was also called panel interlocking (PI) and route relay interlocking (RRI) in which the points and signals are worked by individual switches that control them.

He elaborated that the route relay interlocking is the system used in large and busy stations that have to handle high volumes of train movements. In this, an entire route through the station can be selected and all the associated points and signals along the route can be set at once by a switch for receiving, holding, blocking, or dispatching trains. “Now, the bottlenecks are overcrowded Jalandhar and Ludhiana railway stations which handle the rush of Delhi-Amritsar and Delhi–Jammu trains,” he added. The Railways has been incorporating the latest technique.