Chennai : Others think of rail coach comfort, India of vandals

TNN

Chennai, Jun 13, 2014 : Passengers with a penchant for wrecking train coaches wouldn’t know it, but officials of Indian Railways gather every year to solemnly deliberate their handiwork.

 

The officials have to work out solutions to make coaches vandal-proof by tweaking the design or relocating the position of various train components. It is a trial and error method and is time consuming, but they usually succeed in making train compartments almost impossible for ordinary passengers to tamper with.

 

It is like other things singular to the country: Utility and comfort may define the interiors of railway coaches the world over, but vandalism dictates how train fixtures are designed and installed in India.

 

 

The railways changed the design of around a dozen parts in coaches because they were prone to misuse. These include ventilator grills, emergency windows, window shutters, material used for roof paneling, toilet windows and doors, waste bins and magazine and bottle holders. Many of them were irredeemably damaged within a year in their original form in new compartments.

 

Railways officials found, for instance, that the shutters of emergency windows were broken by passengers so they could rest their elbows. The shutters were moved to the outside of the windows. The railways is installing mesh ventilators on the roof of sleeper coaches because passengers tended to insert waste in them.

Railways inspectors face various challenges while redesigning damaged compartments. "In one case, we had to completely remove the paneling of a sleeper coach to find the manufacturer’s name because the name plate was affixed on the inside. Only after that could we ask for modifications," a senior official said.

 

The railways is in the process of removing curtains from AC 3-tier coaches because the curtain rods were installed too close to the base of ceiling fan and could not be closed properly. "Features included without any foresight have cost the railways time and money," the official said.

 

Vandalism has increased on trains after the railways started rake-sharing, a railways engineer said. "There used to be a dedicated set of coaches for each train. But this is not possible now because of a shortage of coaches," he said. "Coaches used on day trains, for example, are more likely to be damaged than others."

 

In crowded compartments passengers break glass windows and damage toilet doors. Some passengers damage the thin boards used for roofing in toilets, he added.

 

Another engineer said that railway factories pay great attention to the quality of the core components of a coach, but that is not the case with the interiors of coaches.