Unlike a pilot who flies a plane using wire technology, a loco-pilot of the Indian railways does not have an air-conditioned cabin or an electronic display system and has to be proactive, keeping a watch on the route ahead and looking for signals and cautions.
Every few minutes, the loco-pilot and his assistant peep out and call out to each other to cross-verfiy signals and communication boards throughout the journey. While we are a long way off when compared to modern locomotives in Europe where loco-pilots have signal display console in their cabin, test runs are being done to introduce such systems here too.
The South Central Railway (SCR) has been chosen for taking up such pilot runs for real-time display of signals at loco-pilot’s cabin console for which trial runs are being conducted in different sections of Secunderabad in the last few years, explain senior railway officials.
This ‘On Board Display of Signal Aspect’ (OBDSA) is actually part of indigenously-developed Train Collision Avoidance System (TICAS) which the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) of the Ministry of Railways is currently testing in select routes like Lingampalli- Vikarabad- Wadi- Bidar routes.
It is based on determination of location of trains through distance traversed from RFID tags installed on track and transmission of signalling-related information from stationary unit such as station inter-locking. The OBDSA is a portable device akin to a laptop and would be of great help for loco-pilots when visibility is low, especially in winter, due to fog, they say.
The TICAS itself is a high-speed communication network to ensure that trains automatically stop if there is any manual error like inadvertent crossing of the red signal or other malfunction. About 100 locomotives and 16 passenger trains have been fitted with this technology and these are to be tested for two years before they could be deployed universally.
Three firms – HBL, Medha and Kernex – have been chosen for fitting the systems through a tender and the process of integrating them is on. “It will be a game changer in the manner in which the trains operate once it is adopted universally. We can introduce AC locomotives to provide comfort to loco-pilots apart from having sophisticated TICAS,” say senior railway officers.
