Railways dumps manual recording, introduces data loggers to improve punctuality of trains

In a bid to eliminate the practice of manually recording punctuality performance at 41 major railway junctions across zones to ensure correct reporting of such data, Railway Board has instructed zonal railways to link the arrival and departure of trains with data loggers from January 1, 2018 without the fear of drop in punctuality and report authentic punctuality status, said a statement from Ministry of Railways.

A data logger, also data known as recorder, is an electronic device that records data over time by sensing status of relays. Railway zones have provided such data loggers across 41 stations which include Howrah, Mumbai CST, Mughalsarai, Lucknow, Kanpur, Chennai Central, Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

In order to run trains punctually and provide information to their customers more current, reliable and accurate, with minimal human intervention, Indian Railways provided data loggers at stations to monitor the status of functioning of signaling gears. For train control, Optical Fibre network has also been laid and linked to control centres of the divisions.

The ministry said, "It was decided to utilize these data loggers for capturing trains running information & update Control Office Application (COA) automatically at the central server. For this purpose, to start with, the data loggers of one terminal station and one more station at each zonal railway is linked with COA through optical fibre backbone for automatically picking up the train running status."

"The work at 17 terminal stations and 17 other stations has been implemented as a pilot project. The system has been working since January 1, 2018 and extended to total 41 stations," said the statement.

Punctuality of almost 80% of mail/express trains is monitored through this system as of date, and the ministry has planned to further expand the network covering all the terminal stations. 

With the implementation of this system, the information available to the passenger is reliable and more current, the statement added.