By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI/BHUBANESWAR: To ensure swift supply of coal across power plants, additional trains and rakes by Indian Railways have been initiated to augment transportation of coal through its network. Indian Railways has ramped up the coal transportation resulting in 32% more coal freight loading between Sept’ 21 – March’ 22. There has also been an increase in 10% freight, by efficiently mobilizing resources after April’ 22.
During the year 2021-22 Indian Railways has augmented the transportation of Coal through Railways by a record 111 Million tonnes and loaded a record 653 Million Tonnes of coal as compared to 542 Million tonnes in the previous year i.e. a growth of 20.4 %.
Further during the period Sept-21 to Mar-22 loading of coal to power sector was augmented by 32% in just 2 quarters.
In April 2022 , IR has taken many steps to prioritize the loading of coal to power sector which has led to increase in supply of coal of more than 10 % within one week time.
This improvement has been possible due to various measures undertaken by Indian Railways some of which are listed below :
The movement of Coal trains have been prioritized and the each and every train is being intensively monitored during the entire cycle from Loading to movement and finally unloading.
Through this prioritization and monitoring the Transit time of coal trains to long distance Power has been reduced significantly by 12-36% for critical power plants.
Indian Railways has prioritized the movement of coal to long distance Power houses as well which is reflected in the fact that the average lead of coal trains has increased by 7 % in the last 5 days as compared to the average leads of 1st to 10th April.
Despite this increase in the average lead of coal trains the time taken between two successive loading of the same rake for these stocks has reduced by 10%. With these operational innovations Indian Railways has augmented the supply of coal trains to Power houses as well as has loaded more coal rakes on a sustained basis.
