Survey on for AC coach, while model sits home
MRVC is conducting the survey, though the prototype built for Western Railway five years ago never took off as it didnt go down well with people ……..NILESH NIKADE
It is interesting to note that while the Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation (MRVC) is conducting a survey on running air-conditioned local trains in Mumbai, a prototype AC coach made for the Western Railway five years ago, lies gathering dust in a car shed. The coach had many trial runs but remained indoors after people protested against the idea. Coach 915 C was the first local train compartment in the Indian Railways to be converted into an air conditioned one. An area of the size of the luggage compartment was chosen for this experiment and WR engineers worked for six long months to convert their dream into reality.
Ravi Agarwal, a chief engineer with MRVC and then incharge of coach designing for WR said, The prototype compartment was designed to accommodate around 40 people with a seating capacity of 18. It had a roof mounted air conditioner. The compartment had glass doors which had to be opened and closed manually. We carried almost 12 trial runs of the model, including one with the media and all of them were successful.
The idea was to introduce one such compartment in each 12 car train running on WRs fast tracks. The WR had then decided to issue monthly season tickets for the commuters and had estimated the travel cost for a journey between Borivali- Churchgate at Rs 4,000.
The idea of running just one AC train would have never worked as commuters would prefer such services at regular intervals. Also in order to make the project successful, we needed continuous occupancy and converting one compartment of every train into an AC one is the only feasible way to implement this
project, adds Agrawal.
project, adds Agrawal.
The project, however, failed to take off as people felt the manual opening and closing of doors was a little unsafe. However, MRVC has now again started collecting commuters opinions about having AC compartments on trains. Prakashrao Wazalwar, Chief Operations manager with MRVC said, We would like to have AC compartments attached to local trains and the idea is to demotivate car users on roads.
The prototype AC compartment was designed to accommodate around forty people with a seating capacity of eighteen. It had a roof mounted air conditioner. Almost 12 trial runs of the model were carried out and all of them were successful