For the first time in its 85-year-old history, the Golden Rock railway workshop here is all set to overhaul freight wagons of broad gauge type.
The Railway Board has given its go ahead in this regard to the Tiruchi workshop engaged in a mosaic of activities such as manufacture of oil-fired steam locomotives, container, and stainless wagons besides carrying out periodic overhaul of diesel locos and passenger coaches.
The premier workshop of the Indian Railways will overhaul open type ‘BOXN’ wagons essentially used for transporting coal and iron ore. To start with, the workshop will overhaul 15 freight wagons before stepping up the activity in due course.
Each of these freight wagons has a carrying capacity of around 60 tonnes.
Equipped with a highly skilled technical workforce and sound infrastructure facilities, the workshop will overhaul wagons used by different railway zones.
Once overhauled, the wagons would again be sent for a periodic refurbishment after four-and-a-half years.
Railway officials told The Hindu that this would be the first time that the Golden Rock workshop would venture into overhauling of freight wagons.
The Carriage and Wagons workshop at Perambur in Chennai was the other organisation in Southern Railway zone to overhaul freight wagons.
By venturing into this fresh activity, the multi-faceted Tiruchi workshop would be overhauling all types of rolling stock now, said officials. In the past few years, the workshop had despatched a little over 3,800 container wagons for the Container Corporation of India. It has exported over 120 “in-service” metre gauge diesel locomotives to many developing countries after carrying out necessary modifications in them.
Having augmented infrastructure facilities, the workshop would overhaul from next year onwards the 4,500 high horsepower “EMD” locomotives which can run at a maximum speed of 140 km per hour.
