Kochi: Railways' smart work to ease travel

Kochi: The railways has carried out track replacement for a record 65 km section this year in the Thiruvananthapuram division, twice that of the average kms covered a year so far.

More importantly, the work was carried out in heavily-congested Shornur-Ernakulam and Ernakulam-Kottayam sectors.

“We’ve often postponed track replacement work in the two sections as they witness a heavy schedule of trains and implementing a line block will affect the whole services. However, work in the stretches was successfully completed. We’ve also started ballast replacement, done in once in 10 years, in the Shornur line,” said Divisional Railway Manager Prakash Butani.

Track replacement done in the previous years are 2015 – 57 kms, 2014 – 28 kms and 2013 – 25 kms  respectively, he said.

“A high priority is being given to track maintenance work even at the cost of punctuality. The work resulted in late running of trains. Since we’ve nearly 1000 kms of tracks in the division, we’ll carry out the safety work in 2017 too and recommended the PWD project to be included in the coming budget,” the official said.

The safety works were hastened post the Karukutty train mishap on August 28. Before that, the tracks in the Shornur-Ernakulam section was last replaced in 2004.

An RTI query revealed that rail fractures are alarmingly high in the section where a total of 28 rail fractures were detected as against the total 65 in the entire division from January 2014 to 2016.