Indian Railways, on Monday, took the first stride towards framing emission standards for long-haul diesel locomotives and diesel power cars plying along suburban routes on its system with the commissioning of an Emission Test Car (ETC) at the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) here.
The ETC, said to be the world's first mobile emission testing vehicle in the rail sector, will put the Indian Railways on a par with global rail systems in terms of green milestones and also pave the way for the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) to lay down standards and monitor locomotives for compliance with emission norms.
The ETC which uses mass emission measurement equipment supplied by Horiba from Japan will test locos for oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter, total hydrocarbons, methane hydrocarbons, smoke opacity, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The ETC can be deployed at any diesel shed across the 17 zones of the Railways.
Sanjiv Handa, Member (Mechanical), Railway Board, who commissioned the ETC also launched the phase I of the Enterprise Resource Planning initiatives in Indian Railways.
He said the way forward for the modernisation of Railways was to adopt retrofitting of existing assets instead of solely pursuing big projects. However, it was important to equip the Railways with the tools that help determine the apt technology that would deliver the greatest dividend for an authentic upgrades of an old asset, he said.
He suggested the country's substantial metre gauge assets could be put to productive use by reconfiguring them into environment-friendly shunting locos. Steam locos could also be pressed into service in hill station sectors where such locos would always be required.
Interacting with the press later, Mr. Handa stressed the need for the Railways, especially the ICF, to reclaim its space in the supply of rolling stock for Metro rail entities. Though the ICF had a limited playing field —supplying rolling stock only to the Kolkata Metro Rail whereas other entities sourced it from other vendors —it could set benchmarks in costs and technical parameters. He pointed out that the ICF supplies stock to the Kolkata Metro at about Rs.4 crore which was only half the rates at which stock was externally sourced by other Metro entities.
Abhay K. Khanna, ICF General Manager, said the ICF was increasingly integrating technology in its production lines for projects such as double-decker coaches and redesign of second class coaches to improve passenger comfort, operational cost and raising speed of trains.
The ICF also planned to scale up its capacity to 1,700 coaches from 1,500 coaches this year, complete a high speed bogie production facility by June 2013 and stainless steel shell manufacturing facilities by March 2014, Mr. Khanna said.
V. Ramachandran, RDSO Director-General, said one of the immediate plans for the ETC was to conduct a correlation exercise with microelectomechanical systems and to pilot it on five diesel locomotives at the ICF loco shed.
Vikram Chopra, Managing Director, Centre for Railway Information Systems and Vijay Meshram, Controller of Stores, were present.
