When Hitendra Baishya and Vikram Mishra stand across each other on the two platforms of the Changsari railway station, about 25 km north of Guwahati, their ears begin filtering out ambient sounds to concentrate on an approaching train.
As their eyes follow the train zooming past at 60-100 kmph, their ears “look out” for a hammering sound that appears indiscernible from the clickety-clack of steel wheels on iron track and the screech of the locomotive horn. “No flat tyre,” Mr. Baishya, the station master, says after the blinking red tail lamps of the train fade into the horizon. Mr. Mishra, the pointsman, has a similar ‘aural report’. Their informal visual reports are in agreement too; the Delhi-bound North East Express had no hanging parts.
“The wheels or a running train make a rhythmic sound that may be off-tune if any wheel has a flat tyre. One needs to have highly developed senses to detect this amid the sounds that a train makes,” says principal chief safety officer of Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) M.K. Agarwal.
Practical training
The sense is developed through practical training for 20-30 days. A passenger coach has eight wheels and a locomotive 12. One or more of the wheels may develop flatness due to friction. The railways allow up to 50 mm of flatness.
“If the flatness is within 50 mm, the wheel gets back the circular shape because of friction. If the flatness is more, the wheel makes a hammering sound. A train is then stopped, its bogie or locomotive detached for replacing the defective wheel,” says Mr. Agarwal.
Mr. Baishya and Mr. Mishra, along with other staff, scan an average of 40 pairs of passengers and mail express trains that pass through Changsari every day. The drill to detect unusual sounds towards preventing accidents is the same at other stations and level crossings along the route.
“A train gets scanned, with naked eyes or gadgets, every 10 km by a team of more than 600 people in the zone. It includes section engineers and gangmen, who ensure no screw or bolt is out of place,” says Mr. Agarwal.
Some railwaymen have learnt to sniff ‘potential disaster’ too. S. Ray and Mohammed G. Ali, gatemen at a level crossing on the western edge of Guwahati, have developed their olfactory senses to smell elephants from afar. The level crossing is on a track that runs between the Rani Reserve Forest and Deepor Beel, a major wetland designated as a Ramsar Site.
“There are certain sounds elephants make while making their way through the vegetation to come to the wetland. We have also learnt to smell them from a distance for sounding an alert,” says Mr. Ray.
NFR spokesperson Pranav Jyoti Sharma says accidents due to human error happen when there are multiple failures. “Many departments work in tandem. There are various layers of safety checks, and it requires all units or sections to fail together for a disaster to happen,” he says.
The likes of Saef Ali, a welder at NFR’s Rangiya Division headquartered 65 km north of Guwahati, are vital cogs in the safety wheel. The railways had a month ago awarded Mr. Ali for executing 793 rail welds since April 2017. These welds were tested ultrasonically and found to be defect-free.
