Busy rail route, but minus staff
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Don’t trust a railway guard blindly the next time he blames power outage for an EMU stopping midway and preventing you from reaching your destination in time. Most often, it could be an engine breakdown ‘covered up’ to pacify passengers.
Sources at Tambaram car shed, which maintains and repairs the 25 EMUs running on Beach-Vilupuram route, told DC that at least three or four EMUs return to the shed with a failed engine every week.
About 15 twelve-car and 10 nine-car EMUs operate on the route. Authorities retain one car in both categories at Tambaram shed and run the rest on the route.
Senior railways sources said most of the EMUs were up to 15-year-old and their current hauling capacity was grossly inadequate to handle the huge traffic, which increased 10.44 per cent by April last after TN hiked bus fares.
“If you had observed closely, most break downs or power outages would be reported between Mambalam and St Thomas Mount, which witness heavy passenger traffic, particularly between 6 and 9pm. Sometimes overcrowded EMUs move very slow,” officials said attributing it to weak and faulty engines.
A 12-car EMU has 16 motors in four sets, while the 9-car rake has 12 motors in three sets. “An EMU would run till three motors choke, but beyond that it would die,” technical staff explained.
Worse, repair and maintenance gets inevitably delayed for shortage of staff. Tambaram car shed had around 980 staff in the 1990s, but now its just 480. Another 195 would retire by December 2013.
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