Longer freight trains may be the answer

1-Oct-2018

The Railways must look to add more wagons to freight trains, as this segment continues to subsidise passenger traffic

The Indian Railways (IR) is one of the four railway systems in the world which transports more than a billion tonnes of freight traffic per year. The others are the US, Russia and China. In 2017-18, IR moved 1.16 billion tonnes of freight. In addition, it also carried 8.3 billion passengers — about 2.4 crore per day, which is equivalent to moving the entire population of Australia every day!

No other railway system in the world carries this volume of passengers and freight on the same tracks. Most large railroads such as those in the US, Australia and China, have separate tracks for passengers and freight. On IR, dedicated freight lines are yet to come. The mixed running on IR creates problems in management of traffic.

Passenger and freight trains run at different speeds and a slow running freight train has to be stopped frequently to allow a faster passenger train to pass. This reduces the average speed of the freight train. It is akin to road traffic being stopped in advance for a VIP convoy to pass. The greater the difference between the speed of passenger and freight trains, the higher is the erosion of capacity of the network.

IR is facing a severe crunch of investible resources. Passenger tariff is traditionally subsidised by government policy. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) report of on Railway Finances tabled in March 2018, in 2015-16, losses in passenger and other coaching services was so high that it would take 85.53 per cent of the profit from freight traffic to offset the loss.

Capital crunch

After subsidising passenger traffic there is very little surplus left for capital investment. Government support through Plan finances also reduced after the Eighth Plan. Dependence on extra budgetary resources, such as borrowings from the Indian Railway Finance Corporation, increased sharply. Freight tariff has been hiked steadily to offset the loss on the passenger front.

Due to inadequate availability of funds, the growth of IR’s network was very slow. Using index numbers and taking 1950-51 as the base at 100, the network has increased from 100 to 155 whereas freight increased from 100 to 1407 and passenger traffic to 1675!

According to the White Paper on IR placed before Parliament in February 2015, almost all the arterial corridors of IR were saturated and the network required immediate expansion.

The Chinese Railway, with which comparisons are frequently drawn, has expanded its network more than five-fold since 1949.

Six trunk routes connecting the four metropolises of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata carry 56 per cent of the traffic of IR. The average speed of freight trains is about 23 kmph whereas the average speed of super-fast mail express trains running on the trunk routes is more than 55 kmph. The erosion of line capacity for freight services has been particularly acute on these trunk routes.

With increasing saturation of the network, the efficiency of utilisation of assets dropped. Thus the number of kilometres travelled by a freight wagon per day dropped from 262 km in 2010-11 to 204 km in 2016-17. Similarly, the time interval between two successive loadings of a wagon (wagon turn round time) increased from 4.97 days in 2010-11 to 5.32 days in 2016-17. The saturation of the network led to drop in the incremental output obtained per unit of capital invested. This also finds mention in the CAG report.

The present government has sanctioned a large number of capacity expansion projects and allocated funds. These would take time to complete. In the interim period, unless there is a radical review of passenger tariff policy (which is highly improbable), it would be freight traffic which would have to grow rapidly to repay borrowings and create a surplus for future investment. This growth has to be achieved despite the congestion of the network. The convenient method of increasing freight tariff would have to be avoided as it only serves to divert traffic away from rail.

Longer freight trains

One strategy for handling higher volumes of freight within the saturated network is to run longer freight trains with twice the number of wagons by putting one locomotive in front and one in the middle of the train. Two locomotives, when electrically coupled, work in perfect unison.

The payload of a freight train of 59 with wagons carrying coal is about 4,000 tonnes. If the number of wagons is doubled to 118, effectively two freight trains run together carrying 8,000 tonnes, thereby creating capacity for running more trains. The only problem is that the loop lines at the stations, which are used to hold a train and pass another, cannot accommodate more than 59 wagons. Increasing the length of loop lines to accommodate 118 wagon trains at selected stations on congested routes has been planned for a long time.

The projects are simple to implement as they involve adding just 800 metres of track to the existing loop line. However, progress on this front has been very slow. Yet, this is the only method which would yield immediate dividends in the short run. Running of longer freight trains on all congested routes has to be institutionalised. Thus will create capacity to run container trains with high value cargo to be handled at new logistics hubs.

Speed factor

Providing additional locomotives to freight trains may help to reduce the difference in speed with passenger trains. At the same time, plans for running new and faster passenger trains on existing routes should be critically examined to assess the level of further erosion of the track capacity available for moving freight. It should also be examined whether these trains would at least break even in terms of costs.

Creation of additional capacity sometimes falls prey to populist demands. Investment must be targeted to congested routes where traffic would grow rapidly and these projects have to be completed fast.

There is an urgent need to develop a holistic plan for accelerating the growth of freight transportation. The paradigm of keeping passenger fares artificially low as a social objective can only be sustained by nurturing freight traffic so that it grows fast and provides the necessary surplus to subsidise passengers and yet provide capital for development. There is also a crying need to review the tariff for passenger services.

Source: THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE