Mumbai to become first city to combine communications-based train control and Kavach tech, which will double the number of services over a period of three years
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw travelling by local train from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus to Mulund. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi
Mumbai will be the first city to get a communications-based train control (CBTC) embedded Kavach system that will not just make the Mumbai suburban system completely safe but also ensure the headway between train services is reduced drastically and more than double the services in the next three years.
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Indian Railways has been working on the Kavach safety device for some time. We have been conducting trials, while releasing various versions and now obtained the highest Safety Integrity Level (SIL)-4 with a version of Kavach-4, which will be rolled out soon,” Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told mid-day.
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi
Sources said while Kavach is an indigenous anti-collision system the CBTC’s responsibility is to shorten the distance between trains. The merging of both technologies will revolutionise Mumbai’s suburban travel. The CBTC is one of the components of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) Phase 3A being developed by the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation.
“A version of CBTC Kavach will be rolled out in Mumbai first. If we need more frequency, we need to cut down the gap between the two trains. The Mumbai suburban railway- Central and Western Railway- jointly operate over 3,000 services on the Mumbai suburban systems spanning 319 kilometres. We are getting Kavach, but for the suburban system, we are getting a Kavach with CBTC Kavach. We are working on a project to cut down the headway time of trains from 180 seconds to further down. The reduced headway will mean that we can run a greater number of trains in the same system and we can ensure double the number of services,” Vaishnaw told mid-day, adding that the project will take about three years or so to complete.
319 km
Length of the Mumbai suburban railway system
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