With IIT (Kanpur) comple-ting a three-year exercise to digitally map the 7,000-odd railway stations in the country, the stage is set for the Indian Railways to roll out a satellite-based train tracking system. The system, which gives real-time information on a train?s status to passengers, would enable mobile train radio communication, national-level rail traffic management and anti-collision mechanisms.
Now, movement of trains is charted manually ? each station communicates the arrival and departure of a train to the next station.
Test runs for the new tracking system, which uses a combination of GPS and GPRS technologies, have been conducted on about 15 trains. These include the Rajdhani and Shatabdi originating from New Delhi and a few passenger trains between Lucknow and Kanpur.
The railway ministry is planning to implement it on all its 10,000-odd trains gradually. ?We will definitely try to install the system on more trains this year,? an official said.
The Satellite Imaging for Rail Navigation (Simran) project, a part of the Railway Technology Mission, has been created indigenously by IIT-K and the Rail Designs & Standard Organisation and is inspired by the European Traffic Control System, a state-of-the-art locomotive traffic management system.
NS Vyas, national coordinator of the Railway Technology Mission and head of department (mechanical engineering), IIT-K, said, ?This kind of a charting system comes in handy as it helps to increase the speed of trains.?