CCTVs to record glitches in trains

Mumbai: Commuters are soon likely to get relief from the delays caused in long-distance train journeys due to technical faults in the trains they are travelling in.

The technical glitches in long distance trains in motion will be recorded by high-quality CCTV cameras, which have been installed at Vasai station as a pilot project by the Western Railways (WR).

This will help the Railways capture the movement of a running train so as to ascertain what hampers the train’s functioning so that the problem can be fixed beforehand.

The initiative has been launched keeping in mind that premium trains like Rajdhani, August Kranti and Duranto ply on the WR. The cameras that have been installed have the capacity to capture 69 frames per minute, an official said.

“When the train is in motion we hope that the technical problems that cannot be viewed by the naked eye, will be identified by this camera when the vehicle is running at full speed,” the official said.

Many a time, passengers finds themselves stuck in the train even before it makes its way out of the city limits, often due to a problem in the train that might be minute but causes it to be delayed by more than an hour or so.

A WR official said, “We hope to see what should be the ideal alignment of the wheels and undercarriage of the train once it is moving and also able to identify when something does not look right.”

The official further added, “If we know how it should not look, we will see it in the CCTV footage of the undercarriage and alert the loco-pilot and send someone to attend the issue on the next halt.”

Currently, the cameras have been placed at end of Vasai’s platform numbers 3 and 4 for trains heading towards Gujarat and a few trains towards Panvel end as well.