Bombardier Transportation, which has its global headquarters in Berlin, Germany, has been a supplier to the Indian Railways for over 35 years now. The company recently bagged an order to supply an advanced Traffic Management System (TMS) to the Indian Railways for its Kalyan-CST stretch falling under the aegis of Mumbai Suburban Railway. The contract, approximately valued at $6 million, has been awarded for the design, supply, installation, testing and implementation of a TMS for the central line stretch of the Mumbai Suburban Railway as mentioned above. The TMS project is expected to be phased out over the next two years. Biztech2.0 spoke to Rajeev Jyoti, MD, Bombardier Transportation India, to get an insight into the company’s plans and strategy for execution of this contract.

Can you enumerate and elaborate the various systems, applications and software that constitute a typical TMS?

The system proposed for Mumbai Suburban Central Railway is the robust EBICOS TMS. As a part of this system, live inputs are received by the field interface units (FIUs) called the EBISAT. These FIUs are field proven and immune to the track EMC. The data will be sent over a fibre optic channel to the control room, where it will be handled by Intel Itanium servers and presented to operators managing the workstations.

How different is this TMS from the one provided to the Mumbai Suburban Western Railway in 2007?

The TMS for the Mumbai Suburban Central Railway will be based on the already-proven Western Railway one; nevertheless, this system will use more powerful Itanium servers. Additionally, the CR management has opted for an Automatic Routing System (ARS) for the CST station to efficiently handle the heavy traffic load it receives.

How will the Mumbai Suburban Central Railway benefit from the TMS?

The first TMS in India was installed by us in 2004 for the Mumbai Suburban Western Railway stretch that is spread across a periphery of 60-km around the city and handles the world’s heaviest rail commuter traffic. With the help of the TMS, the Mumbai Suburban Western Railway today runs with remarkable punctuality and safety and handles almost 1,000 trains everyday, which in itself is an impressive achievement.

Similarly, a TMS for the Mumbai Suburban Central Railway will significantly improve safety on the CST-Kalyan stretch, which covers an area of 53 km, touches 32 stations and handles in excess of 1,400 trains daily. With the TMS, traffic controllers will be able to monitor some of the densest train traffic in the world on a real-time basis. The system will manage train arrivals at each station after successive gaps of three minutes each and will also provide the information required for rapid decision-making in case of a disruption.

What will be the benefits to the commuters?

Around three million passengers travel everyday on the Mumbai Suburban Central Railway. With the new TMS from Bombardier, commuters will receive an updated, minute-by-minute countdown regarding the arrival time of any train on the platform. In addition, there will be automatic multi-lingual passenger announcements on the train, bilingual displays at station entrances, and information relating to the next two incoming trains will be displayed on every platform. All this will go a long way to add to the convenience of commuters.

Can you list out the technological challenges that were faced by your company while installing the Western Railway TMS?

The major challenge associated with a TMS of this kind is to have a functional system in place for a rail stretch where trains are operational for 20 hours out of 24 hours on any given day. Going further, investments have to be made for training the current operating staff so that they can take the maximum benefit out of the new system.