Coronavirus: WR develops in-house swab booth at Lower Parel workshop

Picture/Rajendra B Aklekar

In efforts to provide assistance to the medical fraternity in fighting the battle against the deadly Coronavirus pandemic, Western Railway has come up with various ingenious equipment, including high-quality PPEs, steel beds for patients, isolation coaches, reusable masks, sanitizers, etc.

Continuing with their efforts, Western Railway's Lower Parel Workshop has now manufactured a booth to collect the swab sample of COVID-19 infected patients. This booth enables doctors and medicos to take the sample/swab without exposing themselves to the affected patient.

According to Ravinder Bhakar - Chief Public Relations Officer of Western Railway, a request to make a kiosk with the concept of distance sample collection had come from Western Railway's Jagjivan Ram Hospital, which is a nominated 172-bed Coronavirus hospital. The work was done on war footing mode right from arranging the material, fabrication, and furnishing and was completed within 6 hours. The design has been developed by two teams of workshop engineers (Carriage Repair and Basic Training Centre), who manufactured this booth with the available material in the workshop.

The booth is very sturdy and robust & completely sealed from the front three sides, to ensure that the frontline medical staff is totally isolated from the patient. The structure of the booth consists of a strong fabricated structure of MS square tubes, covered externally with plywood on all sides, and a rear door. The upper half portion of the front side has been covered with a 6 mm transparent acrylic sheet. All material used for repair of coaches has been used in this fabrication. The front side transparent acrylic sheet has been provided with two holes on which rubber hand gloves have been permanently fitted. The team worked against the clock to make the Sample Collection Booth as fast as they can and on April 28, 2020, the newly manufactured booth has been delivered to Jagjivan Ram Hospital at Mumbai Central.

Although it is a coach repair workshop, in this time of crisis, it has contributed in making many other materials helpful for our frontline warriors, working day in and out in hospitals beside our employees. The manufacturer team was led by Shri Arun Kumar Singh - Dy. Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Workshop, and consisted of his technical experts Shri Prashant Deshmukh, Shri Satish Samrut, Shri Arvind Javadia, Shri Sanjai Bhavsar, Shri Manoj Yadav, Shri Mahesh Bhatia, Shri Pradeep Tamboli, Shri Natrajan and along with 10 other members in the team contributed in this effort.

Western Railway salutes the commitment and dedication of its employees who are constantly working to fight this ongoing battle with the deadly Coronavirus Pandemic despite putting their lives at risk.

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