The Electric Loco Shed of the South Central Railway, constructed initially at a cost of Rs. 25 crore completed 20 years of operations. Starting with an initial holding of 72 locomotives, it now handles maintenance of 200 locomotives that includes both passenger and good trains, each with a power of a whopping 6,000 horsepower.
Divisional Railway Manager Ashesh Agrawal and Senior Divisional Electrical Engineer and head of the facility, K. Tourya on Tuesday took mediapersons on a tour of the impressive facility in Hyderabad and showed them the functioning of a workshop that takes care of the maintenance of locomotives (engines) that haul passengers to important destinations including New Delhi, Howrah and Chennai.
Also included in the list of trains are the Rajadhani, Duronto and Sampark Kranthi Express services. Mr. Agrawal said that the shed, with a head count of about 700 persons was able to carry out maintenance of locomotives with best practices on the Indian Railways with the highest reliability of engineers with a meagre manpower of 3.02 persons per loco as on November 1 as against an average of 3.68.
The shed takes care of Wide Area Multipurpose (WAM), Wide Area Passenger (WAP) and Wide Area Goods (WAG) engines with a schedule of one full maintenance once in three months, said Mr. Tourya. He added that the shed was initially only a facility for maintenance of diesel engines till 1995 and once the electric locomotives were introduced, it was transformed into a workshop to handle maintenance of electric engines.
Speaking about the performance of Secunderabad Division, Mr. Agrawal said that it was the 5th high loading division and the eighth in terms of originating passengers and that it was the only division on Indian Railways that was among the top eight in both categories. It had 1,366 route kilometres with 142 stations across the four States of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, with Telangana accounting for almost 1,000 km, he added.
The Secunderabad Division has two mega coach maintenance depots at Secunderabad and Hyderabad apart from three major locomotive maintenance sheds – two electric locomotive maintenances sheds at Lallaguda and Kazipet and one diesel locomotive shed at Kazipet.
