Indigenous train collision protection system ‘Kavach’ to be tested with railway minister on board

Highlights

2 trains will hurtle towards each other at full speed, one with the railway minister on board
The two trains won’t collide, thanks to ‘Kavach’
‘Kavach’ is world’s cheapest automatic train collision protection system: Railways

'Kavach', train collision protection system, was successfully tested on Friday with Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on board one of the two trains. The testing was done on the Sanatnagar-Sankarpalli section in Secunderabad.

The two trains hurtled towards each other at full speed, one with the Railway Minister on board and the other with the Chairman of the Railway Board. But the two trains didn't collide, thanks to ‘Kavach’.

‘Kavach’, which literally means armour, is being promoted by Railways as the world’s cheapest automatic train collision protection system.

The indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system has been built to help the Railways achieve the goal of “zero accidents”. Kavach is designed to bring a train to a halt automatically when it notices another train on the same line within a prescribed distance.

Trains will also stop on their own when the digital system notices any manual error like “jumping” of the red signal or any other malfunction, senior officials said. Once implemented, it will cost Rs 50 lakh per kilometre to operate compared to about Rs 2 crore worldwide, they said.

The system works in three situations — head-on collisions, rear-end collisions, and signal is passed at danger (Spads). A signal is passed at danger (SPAD) when a train passes a stop-signal when not allowed to do so.

‘Kavach’ controls the speed of the train by an automatic application of brakes in case the loco pilot fails to do so.

So far, Kavach has been deployed on over 1098 route km and 65 locos in on-going projects of South Central Railway. Further, Kavach is planned to be implemented on Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi Howrah corridors, having a total route kilometer of around 3000 km, as a part of “Mission Raftar project for raising of speeds to 160 kmph. Tenders for these works are being invited”, officials said.

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