Pondugula

South Central Railway won appreciation from Shri Piyush Goyal, Hon’ble Minister of Railways for the best performance in closure of all Unmanned Level Crossings and record performance in Electrification of the track. Shri Suresh Angadi Channabasappa, Hon’ble Minister of State for Railways presented the certificates of appreciation to Shri Gajanan Mallya, General Manager, South Central Railway during regional function of 64the Railway Week Awards held Ambala, Harayana. Shri Manohar Lal Khattar, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Harayana State and Shri Vinod Kumar Yadav, Chairman Railway Board were present o­n the occasion.

Shri Gajanan Mallya presented the certificate of appreciation in recognition of closing the all UMLCs to Shri K.V. Siva Prasad, Principal Chief Engineer, SCR and Certificate of appreciation for record electrification to Shri A.A. Phadke, Principal Chief Electrical Engineer, SCR today i.e. 23rd July, 2019 at Rail Nilayam, Secunderabad.

Closure of UMLCs o­n Mission Mode:

South Central Railway was having 288 Unmanned Level Crossings (UMLC’s) as o­n 1st April 2017. A policy decision was taken by Ministry of Railways in 2017 to eliminate all UMLCs existing in the railway system. South Central Railway took up this challenging task o­n a mission mode, instead of manning all the Level Crossings (LCs) this railway took up the work of providing Limited Height Subway (LHS) or Road Under Bridge (RUB) at 180 LC locations.

As the work of providing LHS/RUB under running tracks is a daunting and time-consuming task, innovative methods were adopted to construct these LHS/RUBs o­n a fast track mode. Pre-Cast Box segments were used and inserted into the track near LC locations by deploying high capacity road cranes of 200 Tons capacity. To reduce the block time required for insertion of pre cast boxes, temporary steel girders were inserted beforehand with improved methodology so as to take up earth work excavation for placing the box segments in position. During the year 2017-18 and 2018-19 a total of 84 LHS and 96 RUBs were constructed. Balance Unmanned LCs were eliminated by other modes like manning, direct closure and diversion of traffic to nearest LCs. o­n account of the above efforts all unmanned LCs o­n South Central Railway were eliminated by October 2018 which include 151 LCs in year 2018-19 alone.

Record Electrification:

South Central Railway has taken to electrification of its network o­n a priority basis. The zone has lent a big push to electrification projects, targeting completion and commissioning of various projects during the last two years. A total length of 432 Route Kilometers has been electrified during the financial year of 2018-19.

The sections electrified during 2018-19 o­n South Central Railway are, the Obulavaripalli – Venkatachalam 87 Route Kilometers, Guntakal – Kalluru 38 Route Kilometers, Bellary – Guntakal 45 Route Kilometers, Siripuram – Pondugula 83 Route Kilometers, Kukkadam – Pagidipalli 102 Route Kilometers, Vishnupuram – Janpahad 08 Route Kilometers, Peddapalli – Gangadhara 55 Route Kilometers, Telapur – Ramachandrapuram 06 Route Kilometers.