Indian Railways utilises lcoronavirus lockdown period to complete pending works.

With passengers trains' operations suspended, the Indian Railways is utilising the lockdown period to complete several of its long-pending maintenance works in its network.

Most of railways major works were pending and took a long time to complete as it requires traffic block for long durations. Since tracks empty and only freight traffic carrying essential commodities are running, the national transporter will be able to complete several of its works for the last one month, including bridges, tracks and yard remodelling.

Pending for several years, they acted as Indian Railways' bottlenecks in different zones across the country.

Around 500 modern heavy-duty Track Maintenance Machines along with track, signal & Overhead Equipment (OHE) maintainers have worked regularly to complete overdue track maintenance of 12,270 km plain track, said railway in ts statement.

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Railways planned these works during lockdown period considering it ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ to wipe out these maintenance arrears and take up the execution of work without affecting the train service, said the statement.

The health of the track has been monitored through periodic runs of Oscillation Monitoring System (OMS) cumulating 1,92,488 km of track at 5,362 peak locations.

Ultrasonic flaw detection (USFD) of 30,182 km of track and 1,34,443 rail welds has been carried out.

Some of the summer precaution activities like de-stressing of long-welded rail (LWR) which involved huge manpower have been taken up following the social distancing norms. A total of 2,246 km of de-stressing of LWR has been done.

The railways has been able to carry out re-girdering of the bridge on the Tunga River near Shivamogga Town (South Western Railway) sucessfully in a very short period of time.

This is an important bridge with 15 spans of 18.30 m steel plate girders at Km. 61/100-500 on the Birur Jn - Telguppa section of Mysore division. This work at a normal time would have required traffic block of about 45 hours at 3 hours each day, said the railways in a statement.

The existing steel girders are non-standard and being replaced with 25 tonne loading standard steel girders. The height of the bridge is about 20 meeter from river bed. The launching of all girders will be completed, said railways.