Bombardier rake shutdown shocks Western Railway

The Western Railway (WR) has been left stumped at the failure of the newly-acquired Bombardier trains on Saturday and is working round-the-clock to fix the electrical glitch that had brought eight of the rakes to a standstill, leading to the cancellations of around 100 services.

Seventy-two Bombardier-make trains have been purchased at a cost of Rs 3,041 crore, of which roughly 36 have been delivered to be run on the WR. The delivery started early last year with the first service running on March 18, 2015. However, officials had not faced the issue as only a handful of the Bombardier trains were running on the line last monsoon.

“This year we have almost the entire fleet of Bombardier trains running on the WR every day. So when it rained moderately on Saturday and the power tripped due to fluctuations, these trains came to a complete standstill at various stations. The in-built system of the Bombardier is such that it shuts itself down when the power trips more than thrice. Until now we weren’t fully aware of this flaw. We did not realise the seriousness of this defect until the system was shot on Saturday,” said a senior railway official, on the condition of anonymity.

According to officials, there is a representative of the company stationed in Mumbai, but he too was at a loss. “The Bombardier representative came down and tried to fix the issue. However, the scale of failures from 10 am to noon was hard for him to handle as well. We are currently looking into the matter and we have to resolve it as everyone knows that we already see a lot of disruptions during the monsoon,” added the official.

Despite the debacle on Saturday, the WR has been improving its punctuality that had taken a hit for two years due to track work in Andheri, Bandra and Borivali.