Union Minister of Railways, Ashwini Vaishnaw today inspected the successful trial of the “Kavach” system of the Indian railways in the Secunderabad Division of South Central Railway.
These trials were facilitated by the South Central Railways to achieve the corporate objective of safety in train operations across Indian Railways.
Expressing satisfaction over the trials, the minister said that as a part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Mission, over 2000 km of the Indian Railways network will be soon brought under the Kavach system for safety and capacity augmentation in 2022-23 with an addition of around 34,000 Kms later.
What is Kavach System?
Kavach is an indigenously developed automatic train protection system to boost safety in trains operations. It is meant to provide protection by preventing trains to pass the signal at Danger (Red) and avoid a head-on collision.
It activates the train braking system automatically if the driver fails to control the train as per the speed restrictions. In addition, it prevents collision between two Locomotives equipped with a functional Kavach system.
The Kavach system has been developed by the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) in collaboration with the Indian industry. It is a state-of-the-art electronic system of Safety Integrity Level 4 standards.
It is one of the cheapest, Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL-4) certified technologies with the probability of an error being 1 in 10,000 years. Also, it opens avenues of export of this indigenous technology for Railways.
Features of the Kavach System
- Prevention of Signal Passing at Danger (SPAD)
- Continuous update of Movement Authority with display of signal aspects in Driver Machine Interface (DMI) / Loco Pilot operation cum Indication Panel (LPOCIP)
- Automatic Braking for Prevention of Over Speeding
- Auto Whistling while approaching Level Crossing Gates
- Prevention of collision between two Locomotives equipped with functional KAVACH
- SoS Messages during emergency situations
- Centralized live monitoring of Train movements through Network Monitor System.
Kavach Implementation Strategy
Over 96% of railway Traffic is carried on Indian Railway High-Density Network and Highly Used Network routes.
To transport this traffic safely, Kavach works are being taken up in a focused manner as per the following priority set by the Railway Board.
In the first phase, it will be developed on the high-density Routes and on New Delhi-Mumbai and New Delhi-Howrah Sections for 160 Kmph with Automatic Block Signaling and Centralized Traffic Control.
Since such sections have higher chances of human errors on part of drivers resulting in accidents as trains run closer to each other.
In the second phase, it will be developed on the highly used networks with Automatic Block Signaling and Centralized Traffic Control.
In the third phase, the Kavach system will be implemented on other Passenger High-Density Routes with Automatic Block Signaling.