The Railway Board’s claim of running premium trains at a maximum speed of 75 km per hour in dense fog is proving to be hollow. The fog-safety device is proving to be a failure.
VIP trains like Rajdhani-Shatabdi are reaching their destinations late by over nine hours. For this reason, the Railways is forced to run these premium trains on the rescheduled time.
Crores of railway passengers suffered on account of the collapse of train services in North India. A total of more than 260 trains, including Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duronto, Superfast, and Mail-Express, have been cancelled due to dense fog on Monday.
The Railway Board had started a plan to install fog-safety devices a decade and a half ago to enable premium trains to run at a speed of 60 to 75 km per hour in dense fog. The board had then claimed that passenger trains would run at full speed after the fog-safe device was installed in five zonal railways in North India.
The fog-safety device will tell you about the red signal before three kilometers. Apart from this, the driver sitting in the cabin can see the railway crossing, bridge, and signal system. In the fog, the driver cannot see the signals outside, due to which trains are run at a restricted speed. Experts say that more than 25000 devices have been installed in five zonal railways.
According to an estimate, the Railways spent more than two thousand crore rupees on installing the device. But even after a decade, due to fog, brakes are being applied to the speed of trains. A total of 20 premium trains including Bhubaneswar Rajdhani, Howrah Rajdhani, Sealdah Rajdhani, Guwahati Rajdhani, Patna Rajdhani, Kanpur Shatabdi, Jammu Rajdhani were delayed by seven to 9.30 hours on Monday. Due to excessive delay, the said premium trains are being run on reschedule time.
Railway sources said that as soon as December begins, drivers are given verbal orders that there should be no train accidents due to fog, and no action will be taken against them no matter how much the delay is. When a train accident happens, the driver is the first to be blamed. This is the reason that even after having a fog safe device, the drivers are running the train at a speed of 20 to 30 km per hour due to fear.