Here’s How ISRO Will Help The Railways Run Trains Efficiently, And On Time

Among the several reforms initiated by Indian Railways for 2019, a landmark one includes linking its locomotives via ISRO’s (Indian Space Research Organisation) satellites.

This will be done to accurately track trains and automatically update the control charts about their arrival or departure.

The national transporter had already flagged off the system implementation on January 8, starting with few mail and express trains along the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra-Bandra Terminus, New Delhi-Patna, New Delhi-Amritsar and Delhi-Jammu routes.

Speaking to IANS, a senior railway ministry official said, “A new beginning has been made in the new year: the train movement information is acquired and fed to the control charts using ISRO satellite-based real-time train information system (RTIS) automatically.”

Developed by CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems) in collaboration with ISRO, the RTIS device installed in the locomotive will detect the position and speed of trains with the help of ISRO-developed GAGAN geo-positioning system.

Using this information, the device will send updates about the train movement to a central location server in the CRIS data centre.

The information will include arrival, departure, run through, unscheduled stoppages and mid-section updates.

Once the processing of data is completed, the information will be relayed to the Control Office Application (COA) system, paving the way for the automatic plotting of control charts with no manual intervention in the divisions.

In the past, the running status of trains was manually updated, and divisional controls set up for train movement control were dependent on the information passed between stationmasters and station controllers.

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According to railway officials, the COA has already been integrated with National Train Enquiry System (NTES).

In addition to that, the Railways is also working with the premier science organisation to check accidents at unmanned railway crossings.

“The new system will help railways to modernise its control room, railway network for more efficient train movement across its network. The move is aimed at further improving the accuracy of train-running information,” the official added.

(Edited by Gayatri Mishra)

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