 Indian Railways are the largest rail network in Asia and the world's second largest under one management. Criss-crossing the country's vast geographical spread, Indian Railways are a multi-gauge, multi-traction system covering over 1 lakh track kilometres,300 yards, 2300 goodsheds and 700 repair shops. Its rolling stock fleet includes 8300 locomotives, 39,000 coaching vehicles and 3.5 lakh freight wagons. Its work force is 1.65 million and it runs some 11,000 trains everyday, including 7,000 passenger trains. Over the years, Railways have built up an elaborate and well established manual information system to help them monitoring their moving assets. Supported by a dedicated voice communications network, it collects and transmits information from the remotest corners of the country to control centres, at the highest level. The size and complexity of their operations, growing traffic and changing technologies, placed inevitably a heavy burden on this manual information system. Need for its modernisation was therefore felt for sometime. |
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