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. |
