Officials say glitches are being resolved steadily

Mumbai: According to sources in Western Railway (WR), trials of the AC train are finally picking up speed. Officials said that several glitches in terms of the braking system, dysfunctional AC unit and software system are slowly but steadily getting resolved. Two weeks ago, union minister Piyush Goyal had announced in Delhi that the AC train will run in Mumbai on January 1, 2018.

The Central Railway (CR) had been struggling with the same AC train for nearly a year, which was later handed over to the WR in January this year. Officials said that trials were finally seeing some success in the form of control over erratic temperature of the AC unit. An official said, "Initially, the temperature of the AC would not increase beyond 16 degrees and ideally, all public transport keeps a temperature of 22 to 24 degrees. During trials, we realised that it was too cold. Technically speaking, the AC units in themselves have been fitted into a non-AC train and as a result, synchronisation is difficult. Hereon, the trains will come with built-in AC."

The train had also been facing software glitches in its controls located in the motorman's cabin, said another official overseeing the trials. "The train used to give the command to slow down on its own. The train used to not come to a stop immediately. This was a big technical issue but it has finally been resolved," he said.

Other issues included failure to pass command throughout all coaches of the AC train where lights would not get switched on in all coaches if the switch was flicked on from the motorman's cabin. However, this too has been resolved now.

One of the last phases of the train is underway where the train will be run without any weight. These trials are called loaded and unloaded trails, where  sandbags are dumped into the train to simulate the weight of commuters and empty trains are also run to see if the train oscillates too much to either side as this might cause the train to go off the track.