The Centre on Friday claimed that there was a dip in the number of railway accidents in the last 2 years.

In 2014-15, the number of railway accidents was 135 and in which 292 people killed, in 2017-18, in total 73 accidents, 58 people died. In 2018-19, total accidents was 47 and 29 people died, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal informed Rajya Sabha.

Due to the improvement of infrastructure and adopting the safety methods, the accidents have come down for the past two years, he said.

The Minister also said Real-time Train Information System (RTIS) developed in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is being installed on locomotives for automatic acquisition of train movement timings at stations, including arrival and departure or run-through.

They get automatically plotted on the control chart of those trains in the Control Office Application (COA) system, he said.

As of now, railways have installed the system in the 2,649 locomotives out of the 8,700. The trials have yet to complete. Once trails completed, the railways will install it in all locomotives, he aid.

Goyal said RTIS gives mid-section updates with a periodicity of 30 seconds and the Train Controllers can now track the location and speed of RTIS enabled locomotives/train more closely, without any manual intervention, which helps in improving the efficiency of train control.

He also said that this will help during an emergency like breakdown or disaster to send messages from locomotives to the control room.