A lifetime is hard to condense into a few hundred words, especially if it has been as eventful as Neville Jeremiah’s, but the erstwhile Southern Railways chief mechanical engineer tries to encapsulate it as best as he can.
“I made myself enjoy my time in the Railways. Don’t worry about problems, because they are always there,” says Mr. Jeremiah of his career that started off in 1960 in maintenance and went on to management-level positions in a variety of departments until the 1990s.
The son of Arthur Jeremiah, a railway staffer in charge of carriage and wagons, Mr. Jeremiah lost his mother Gertrude at the age of two in 1939. “My sister was just 10 days old when my mother passed away, in Senkottai,” he recalls. “So we both were shifted by our father to Tiruchi and were brought up our great grandmother.”
The Campion School alumnus joined the Southern Railway as a Chargeman in 1960, and until 1967, worked on the maintenance of electric cranes, power hammers and hydraulic machines.
After a short stint in Mysore, he was made foreman in charge of overhauling the diesel locomotives at the Golden Rock Railway Workshops, Tiruchi.
His first job was to replicate imported testing equipment that was being used in the other Railway workshops. “Of course looking at a thing and making it again requires some talent. So many of the products we developed in those days are still in use,” Mr. Jeremiah says.
Much of his research involved writing to manufacturers abroad and asking for technical information and product catalogues. “Companies those days were not so mean in thinking, and used to share information much more easily,” he adds.
Among the pioneering products he developed in Tiruchi was the Fuel Pump Calibrating Test Stand for diesel locomotives, based on an American design. His design talent won him 24 awards, but “I worked out of my own interest in innovation, and not for the awards,” he says.
Working hard
He had to pay a price for his zeal – long working days that started at 7 a.m. and ended past midnight.
“On many days I’d never see my three sons because they’d be in bed when I came home, and I’d be out when they would be getting ready for school,” he rues.
“I’m lucky my wife Yolanda (the couple married in 1963), was father and mother to the children, and took care of everything while I was working.”
Mr. Jeremiah’s skills as a draughtsman kept him busy in the evenings, when he’d sit down to prepare six to eight drawings per product.
“They were meant to be guides for the other workshops and were used by designers in Chitaranjan, Varanasi and so on. The Golden Rock Workshop was meant for maintenance, not manufacture, so these drawings made things easier,” he says.
Mr. Jeremiah completed a five-year engineering certificate course at the foreman’s level, equal to today’s Bachelor of Engineering degree.
Among the major equipment he developed in Tiruchi are a test bed for diesel engines after overhaul that included a water cooling system; a jet cleaning plant for traction motor frames and heavy-duty backing ovens for traction motor armatures.
Whether it was overseeing the establishment of workshops, organising disaster management efforts or handling projects abroad, Mr. Jeremiah appears bemused by his penchant for being in the start-up teams of many Southern Railway ventures. “Perhaps I was the only fellow over there who would volunteer for a project,” he reasons. “But sometimes it would be a specific request from senior officers.”
Significant moments
In 1978, Mr. Jeremiah and his team supervised the first export order of the Workshops – the shipping of five steam locomotives to Tanzania.
“The Swiss engineers who came down to inspect the engines found 200 faults with our locomotives,” recalls Mr. Jeremiah.
“I didn’t go home for three days, as I was new in the field, and still preparing to answer all their questions,” he says. “After the trial run, only 20-odd items had to be sorted out, which we did successfully. Then I was asked to go and see the loading in Madras. Unfortunately, the day we were loading, there was a storm at sea, and one locomotive had slanted and looked as if it would fall down. Then we used sandbags [to bolster the sides] and prayed hard to get the consignment off. Some 20 days later, the trains reached Tanzania,” he adds.
Mr. Jeremiah’s career also included dealing with emergency situations such as the 1987 Rockfort Express sabotage in Ariyalur in which hundreds of passengers were injured (see Page 2).
He was deputed to the US, Canada and Japan for specialised training in project management in 1990.
From 1993-96, Mr. Jeremiah was posted in Kuala Lumpur to supervise the maintenance of 40 diesel locomotives that were exported by the Indian Railways to Malaysian Railways. His expertise was later tapped for similar projects in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
“I was lucky that my senior colleagues supported me even when everyone else was against it,” he says.
Clearly it’s a life that merits to be documented in a book, but Mr. Jeremiah is reluctant to get started. “I have been asked by many people to give details of my life in the Railways. I even wrote out 130 pages of notes (Mr. Jeremiah hasn’t used a computer ever) for a journalist once, but he just vanished with them. Now with recent health problems, I’ve given up on the idea,” he says.
So what keeps him busy these days? “Sleeping,” comes the answer. “He’s making up for all the years [of sleep] that he lost,” smiles Mrs. Yolanda.
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‘Disaster management was a new concept’
Mr Neville Jeremiah recalls the relief effort that he led after the bomb explosion that derailed the Chennai-Tiruchi Rockfort Express on March 15, 1987:
I was working as a Divisional Mechanical Engineer from 1985. March 15, 1987 was a Sunday. As usual, my family and I had all got ready to go to church. As we were leaving, the emergency siren was blown. Selected people had to report immediately, and I was supposed to be one of them, but I didn’t bother.
Before I could go a hundred yards from home, there was a car waiting. I was wanted on the spot, because the diesel loco and eight bogies of the Chennai-Tiruchi Rockfort Express had been blown up by Tamil separatists near Ariyalur, and our General Manager was on the train in the last carriage.
It took us two hours to drive to Ariyalur. It was 9.30 a.m. when we reached. This was the first time I was attending to such a major accident. I had to give a running commentary on all that was happening, by phone to the head office.
It was such a mess – the bridge (over river Marudaiyar) was half gone, the locomotive was in the mud, seven coaches were gone, 138 passengers were injured. Around 25 people had died. The driver was killed, the fireman and another inspector travelling on the locomotive, survived, but rescue operators had to amputate their hands to pull them out of the wreckage.
We were stuck on the site for four days. We were struggling to anchor the carriages, in order to pull them out. The anchors we were using were the rails buried in the ground, but nothing was staying in place because of the carriage weight. An army officer suggested we should dig 8ft in the ground, and bind around a hundred sleepers (rectangular wooden supports for the rails) together and use that as an anchor – and it worked. Soon all the coaches were pulled up easily with this method.
I made around 200 slides on each stage of the operation and supplemented them with a documentary report – just me writing out the events of the day. Those slides came in very handy when the first course on disaster management was started in the Railways. Disaster management was a new concept at that time. I was asked to show and explain my slides to all the other departments because nobody had documented a disaster before.
We put back everything in seven days. We rebuilt the bridge. The river was not in flood, that’s why the terrorists had been able to plant the bomb in the girders of the bridge.
Later, I reconstructed the Ariyalur accident engine, and put it to use in the Nilgiris (Mettupalayam-Coonoor-Ooty line), because the steam locomotive there had become old and was too costly to replace. To take the diesel loco up to Coonoor was very difficult because it was very heavy (120 tonnes) compared to the steam engine (70 tonnes). We made a big formation with 2 steam locos, 2 coaches, and had a trial run on Sunday. It worked, and went up to Coonoor.
Thereafter, the Coonoor to Ooty trains were all diesel. This Ariyalur engine started the line – it is still in use there. – As told to Nahla Nainar
