Indian Railways Takes A Cue From Trump? Plans To Build 3000 Km Of Walls To Keep People Off Train Tracks

Indian Railways plans to build approximately 3,000 km of walls to create a fence around the railway tracks and prevent trespassing, as reported by Financial Express. This comes after the accident that occurred in Amritsar in which festival revellers spilled over to a railway track and 61 people were killed as a result.

The project, which is expected to improve safety, will also prevent cattle trespassing and will be built in residential areas of urban and suburban towns. The construction will cost the national transporter an estimated Rs. 2,500 crore. The walls will be built using Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) and rise to a height of 2.7 metres. The increased will also keep the tracks cleaner than before as dumping waste will not be easy.

Also, this is line with regulations of Commission of Railway Safety which stipulate that tracks, which have trains reaching speeds of 160 kmph, need to be fenced.

Indian Railways recently eliminated all unmanned crossings on major routes, thus drastically improving railway safety. The PM Modi-led government has also created Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh’ (RRSK) in FY18 (2017-18) with a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crores. These funds will be utilised for safety-related works in the railways over the next five years.