Railways To Optimise Usage Of Locomotives With A New Mathematical Formula, Increase Revenue In Turn

The Railways is set to optimise the deployment of diesel and electric locomotives to run passenger trains and increase its revenue by using a software-based mathematical decision support system, Financial Express has reported.

The Railways currently uses a cyclic schedule called locomotive links to run its 3300 electric and diesel locomotive passenger trains. Until now, these links were being prepared manually by sixteen zones of the Railways to operate trains. Now, the Piyush Goyal-led Ministry of Railways, working with experts, has developed and implemented the software-based decision support system to optimize the deployment of locomotives to run passenger trains at an all India level.

“The decision support system utilizes a mathematical model to work out the minimum number of locomotives required to run all the passenger trains as per time table while meeting the maintenance and operations requirements,” the Ministry of Railways said in a statement released on Friday.

According to the ministry, a recently conducted pilot optimisation exercise resulted in reorganising of locomotive links. This will save 30 diesel and 42 electric locomotives (costing about Rs720 crores) being currently run in passenger services. Additional revenue can be generated by using these 72 locomotives released from passenger operations to run freight trains across the country.