Northeast Frontier Railway installs automatic coach washing machine

GUWAHATI: In a big step towards commitment of water conservation, the Northeast Frontier (NF) Railway has installed its first-ever Smart Automatic Coach Washing Plant (ACWP) at Kamakhya Coach Maintenance Depot, stated a press release.

The plant, having multi-stage cleaning facility was on Wednesday Anshul Gupta, General Manager of NF Railway. This system is eco-friendly and provides an efficient and cost-effective technique for outer body cleaning with optimum utilization of water.

Currently, coaches were being manually cleaned, which is time and water consuming. The automatic Coach Washing Plant ensures the 'reduce, recycle and reuse' principle through its water treatment plant. It uses only 300 litres of water out of which 80% is recycled water and only 60 litres (i.e. 20%) of water is fresh water, as compared to 1,500 litres per coach used in manual cleaning. The plant can clean up to 300 to 350 coaches per day. The system is equipped with controlled chemical and soap dilution, which ensures no pollution. It can save around 1,440 litres of water per coach in cleaning activities, thus saving 34,000 litres of water per rake of 24 coaches. Cleaning of coaches through this process also involves saving of manpower, thereby reducing the expenditure.

The Plant is equipped with PLC-based Intelligent Control System, which has an auto start system when the train enters the ACWP. It can count the number of coaches, calculate the speed of train and generate a MIS report. It is also capable of self-diagnosis and auto-indicates any failure in the system. Thus, the state-of-art system provides better quality of cleaning as compared to the conventional manual system of coach washing. The Railway plans to install eight more ACWPs at Siliguri, New Jalpaiguri, Dibrugarh, Katihar, Silchar, Naharlagun, Alipurduar and Agartala.

NF Railway has put one more step forward in the direction of leveraging technology to achieve environmental sustainability with the commissioning of this plant at Kamakhya.

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