A day after a major technical snag on Delhi Metro railway hit thousands of commuters on Thursday, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Director (Operations) Raj Kumar issued a statement on Friday saying the entire operations strategy of DMRC was being reviewed by senior officials to minimise the effects of such technical problems in future. The DMRC will review the voice logs of Thursday's operations and make recommendations within two weeks.
The problem on Thursday that led to long delays for commuters was attributed to a signalling issue in the track circuit between Pragati Maidan and Mandi House, which led trains being run on manual mode at restricted speed of 25 kilometres per hour between these two stations. Trains had to be “shifted to manual mode from the automatic train protection mode (ATP) on which they normally run. Each train was losing about four minutes between the Pragati Maidan and Mandi House stations. While generally trains take about two minutes to commute between these two stations, yesterday they took about six minutes leading to the slowing down of the operations on this corridor,” said Mr. Kumar in the statement. He added that it was necessary to run trains on restricted speed to ensure passenger saf-ety.
Regarding the signalling issue, he said: “While the track circuit was showing presence of the trains on the network, it was not communicating to the trains their distance or gap from the next train, due to which the trains on this stretch could not gain full speed. Because the trains were not getting communication about their distance from the train ahead between Pragati Maidan and Mandi House, it would not have been safe enough to run them on normal speed.” Apart from running on restricted speed, the train operators of the trains on this stretch were also communicating among themselves to ascertain safe distance between them, he added.
Commuters on Thursday had reported delays running into hours for covering distances that usually take a few minutes.
Mr. Kumar added that DMRC is working to ensure that such problems are minimised in Delhi Metro's Phase- III project.
