The new system will help the national transporter to maintain rolling stock and will leverage ICT systems, sensors and data analytics to gather information on rolling stock conditions.

The Indian Railways plans to spend around Rs.3,000 crore to make smart yards in order to mechanize maintenance and repair work of rakes, ending a century-old practise of manual inspections.

According to the proposal, 40 of the 100 yards that the national carrier has would be automated and mechanized at an average cost of around Rs.70-75 crore each. To start with, yards at Mughalsarai and Tughlakabad will be made smart yards.

On average, around 10,000 rakes are inspected manually every month by groups of 4-30 employees, spending as much as six hours per train.

Railway Board member-rolling stock Ravindra Gupta mentioned the plan for smart yards at an international rail conference last week but didn’t divulge details.

Here are the top features of Indian Railways new Smart Yards:

  • The Smart Yard ecosystem comprises of sensors, which are installed on the wayside to collect data from the passing wagons or coaches. The Online Monitoring of Rolling Stock (OMRS) has its own sensors such as RailBAM, WCM-WILD.
  • The system also includes a Smart Yard Integrated Platform (SIP), which creates a central repository of the data. The Yard officials will get a real-time comprehensive report of a rake entering the yard. To provide a seamless picture of the rolling stock, the SIP will integrate the insights driven from the sensor data with legacy application of the national transporter.
  • Thus, with quick detection of the defect, maintenance gangs, as well as equipment, can be planned and deployed proactively on the arrival of the rake in the yard. With this, the turnaround time of the rakes is expected to reduce, which will lead to enhancement of the revenue for Indian Railways, operational efficiency for the yards along with the quality of life of the staff.
  • The OMRS consists of Acoustic Bearing Detector (ABD) and Wheel Impact Load Detector (WILD). The ABD provides an early warning on possible defects in the bearing box, before reaching the stage of the hot box. On the other hand, WILD measures the impact of the wheel on rail tracks to identify the defective wheels in rolling stock automatically.
  • A pilot project of the Track-side Bogie Monitoring System (TBMS) based on the ABD system has been installed at BAKKAS in Lucknow Division. In phase 1, 25 OMRS equipment are likely to be installed at 20 locations across the Indian Railways network. Out of this, 7 are installed and 9 are expected to be installed in the current financial year. While the remaining systems will be installed by 2020.