Indian Railways Join Forces With ISRO For Monitoring 700 Trains In Real Time; Theft Of Goods Will Also End

We’d already filled you in before that the Indian Railways had plans to link up with the Indian Space Research Organisation, to keep a check on real time status of the trains, their arrivals and departures. For this, ISRO developed the GAGAN Geo-positioning system for Indian Railways, which would detect the speed and position of the train, by a Real-time Train Information System (RTIS).

The recent news here is that the Control Office Application (COA) system designed by ISRO has started real-time monitoring over 700 trains, all of them installed with GPS. The system will help track movement of trains even between two stations.

Real-Time Monitoring of Trains using ISRO’s COA

As we were discussing above, after ISRO and Indian Railways decided to collaborate with each other, ISRO developed a RTIS, via which the present status and location of every train qould be sent to a Central Location Server (CLS), where the information will be sent to the COA system, where there will be an automatic plotting of control charts without no manual intervention.

In fact, this COA system will help in tracking the train between 2 stations. This means that along with passenger trains, ISRO will also be able to keep a point to point check on freight trains, making it easy to track them and automatically feed the control room about their movement.

This will help in keeping a track on theft of coal, oil and other materials ferried by freight trains. Anybody who attempts to commit theft or steal goods will be caught red-handed. Indian Railways gets major share of its revenue from freight services. However, the continued theft and pilferage were a cause of concern. The new system will help railways modernise control room, rail network for efficient train movement across the network.

Railways Proposes 25% Discounted Scheme

Parallely, we also informed you yesterday that the Indian Railways is set to roll out a 25% discount fare scheme for those trains which have low occupancy from next month. Trains like Express, Tejas Express, Gatiman Express, Double Decker and Intercity trains among others, will have 25% discount on low occupancy from September.

This is done with the target to bump up ticket sales. Once the scheme is in place, no other discounts such as the flexi-fare scheme or the graded discount in Shatabdi trains will be applicable.