Indian Railways suffered 400 derailments between 2007 and 2012
30 Jun, 2014Reply to a querry filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act has revealed certain facts and figures about the Indian Railways which were hitherto not known. The reply has shown that the railways suffered 400 derailments beteween April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2012, which resulted into 115 deaths and 800 injuries. This implies that during the period 2007-12, on an average, a derailment was recorded every fifth day. The break-up of the derailment was as under:
· 2007-08 witnessed 100 derailments in which 13 passengers lost their lives while 145 were injured.
· 2008-09 witnessed 85 derailments in which 10 passengers lost their lives while 142 were injured.
· 2010-11 witnessed 80 derailments in which 04 passengers lost their lives while 55 were injured.
· 2011-12 witnessed 55 derailments in which 74 passengers lost their lives while 367 were injured.
The steps taken by the Railways to prevent derailments include:
· use of pre-stressed concrete as sleepers on tracks
· standardisation of railway tracks to reduce fatigue of rails under higher axle-load traffic.
· use of long-rail panels to minimise number of welded joints to reduce the risk of derailment
· testing of all the rails and welds ultrasonically.
· use of modern track maintenance machines like tie tamping, ballast cleaning machines, track recording cards, digital ultrasonic flaw detectors, self-propelled ultrasonic rail-testing cars, etc.
· use of coaches with centre buffer couplers with anti-climbing features
· electronic monitoring of track geometry to detect defects