Talking to The Financial Express, Raghavan said the project is being commissioned to facilitate the Indian Railways to acquire timely information to provide quick and improved decisions. The railways would also be able to extend better customer services with optimum utilisation of resources.Phase 1 of the Rail-Net project will interconnect the local area networks (LANs) at the Railway Board, with the existing nine zonal railway headquarters, Central Organisation for Railway Electrification(CORE), Allahabad, and six production units in Chittaranjan, Patiala, Varanasi, Perambur, Kapurthala and Bangalore.

The second phase, which has also been sanctioned, would connect LANs at the seven new zonal headquarters, such as Bangalore, Allahabad, Jaipur, Bhubaneshwar, Jabalpur, Bilaspur and Hasimpur with the centralised training institutes (for the class-I officers) in Vadodara, Nasik, Jamalpur, Secunderabad and Pune, and the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO), Lucknow. A third phase would link all sub-division headquarters, workshops, stores depots, major stations and passenger complaint centres.Illustrating the architecture of Rail-Net, deputy chief signal & telecommunication engineer, southern railway, V Ajith Kumar, said that LANs consisting of server, router, switches/hubs, and modems located in all zonal headquarters, production units, centralised training institutes, RDSO, CORE will be connected with each other through 64 kilo bauds/sec (KBPS)/9.6 KBPS with the railways owncircuits or DoT leased circuits with alternative routing.

The network between the Rail Bhavan and other metros i.e Western, Eastern, and the Southern Railway would be through 64 Kbps leased line from DoT. Apart from this, the link between Rail Bhavan and Southern Railway will also be through 64 Kbps line leased from DoT.

The South-Eastern Railway and the North-Frontier Railway will be connected to the Eastern Railway and the North-Eastern Railway through 64 kbps/9.6 kbps DoT leased line whereas the network of all other zonal headquarters will be with the railways own circuits, he added.

Electronic mail, electronic date interchange, World Wide Web, and Telenet i.e the dial-up network would be the internet tools for the Rail-Net project, Ajith said. The Rail-Net websites contain a host of information including policy directives, procedures etc.

Internet access with 128 kbps is also being provided in Delhi and Mumbai which will enable authorised Rail-Net users to exchange e-mail globally and to browsethe World Wide Web. The Rail-Net user will have the same e-mail address for internet also.

The first phase of the project would cost about Rs 2.4 crore (only for networking), Ajith said. The project (I & II phase) would be completed latest by March next year, he added.