Prepared by :-Vaibhav Shrivastava

Indian Railways

Indian railway is 150 years old

Largest Railway system in world under one management

Lifeline of the country

Biggest civilian employer in the world

No strike in last 30years despite 17 lakh workers

Targeted by public during any Rally, agitation etc.

General Information

Indian Railways covers 64000 of route km along length & width of the country

It runs 12000 trains every day

Carry 1.4 crore passengers & 16 lakh tonnes of goods every day

Fuel efficient system

Infrastructure

Railways has 7500 engines, 38000 coaches & about 2.5 lakh of wagons

7000 stations & about 500 computerized passenger reservation centers

1 lakh km of track

17 lakh employee (10 lakh in Group C) including 10000 officers

6 lakh staff Quarters & Biggest township Kharagpur has 12000 Quarters

Organisation

3 tier Management system

Top – Railway board or Ministry of Railways headed by Chairman Railway Board

Middle -16 zones headed by General Managers

Bottom -67 divisions headed by Division Railway Managers

Digitalisation of

Indian Railways

Photovoltaic Technology

Alternative method of supplementing grid supply by the use of Diesel Generator sets pose considerable logistic problems

(PVs) are arrays of cells containing a Solar photovoltaic material that converts solar radiation into direct current electricity

Materials presently used for photovoltaics include monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, microcrystalline silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide/sulfide

Solar cells produce direct current electricity from light, which can be used to power equipment or to recharge a battery

Passenger Reservation

System (PRS)

Around 5.5 lakhs passengers in reserved accomodations everyday

PRS facilitates booking and cancelling of tickets from any of the 4000 Terminals all over the country

PRS was launched on 15 November 1985 (IMPRESS)

1987- PRS implemented at Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Secunderabad

Failure of IMPRESS due to addition of new locations and many redefinitions

Passenger reservation system

Country Wide Network for Computerised Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing (CONCERT) was developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), New Delhi & implemented in 1994 at secunderabad

PRS servers maintained at the five sites in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Secunderabad and operate in a distributed database process environment

PRS networking of entire Indian Railways completed in April, 1999

Passenger reservation systemContinue. . .

PRS is running currently at 1,200 locations, Deploying 4,000 terminals , covering journeys of 3,000 trains and executing ONE MILLION passenger transactions per day

Internet booking of tickets was started In August 2002

TATKAL has been converted from a separate coach to a normal Quota and enabled for all trains in 2004

Internet booking timings extended to 5:30 a.m. – 11:30 p.m. from March 2005

Passenger reservation systemContinue. . .

CONCERT NETWORK TOPOLOGYCONCERT NETWORK TOPOLOGY

Delhi PRS

Mumbai PRS

Chennai PRS

kolkata PRS

Secunderabad PRS

2 MBPS (x2) Leased Line

2 MBPS (x2) Leased Line6

2 MBPS Leased Line

2 MBPS (X 2) Leased Line

2 MBPS Leased Line

2 MBPS (x2) Leased Line

Delhi

SecBad

Calcutta

Mumbai

Chennai

Communication of all terminals with their server was established using Railway/Department of Telecommunication (DOT) channel lines, fibre optic cable/microwave channels, switches, modem, multiplexers etc

System has the capability of issuing reserved tickets from anywhere to anywhere, in any train, date or class between any pair of stations from any booking terminal of the PRS

Main modules of the PRS are the Reservation module, the Cancellationand Modification Module, the Charting Module, the Accounting Module and the Database Module

Major outputs generated by the system are Reservation cum journey tickets, Cancellation/Modification tickets, Reservation Chartsand Daily Terminal Cash Summary

Unreserved Ticketing System

(UTS)

Printed ticket

Till the 1990s, tickets were manually issued

Printed Card Ticket (PCT) had all the details like origin, destination, class, fare etc

Booking clerk had to stamp the date and time of issue using a dating machine

Today:•17 million passengers travel by Indian Railways every day•Less than 1 million travel on reserved tickets•Unreserved passengers contribute over 8700 crores anually to railway revenues that is around 53% of Indian Railways income from passenger traffic

Printed tickets : Why Not ?

Every station had to stock tickets for every possible destination

Stations were required to stock 10-20 months requirement of tickets

Protection of tickets from termites, rodents, leaky roofs etc. was also required because each PCT had a monetary value

Since PCTs had the fare pre-printed on them, whenever a fare change was to be implemented the station staff at each station had to manually correct the fare on each ticket in stock

Misuse of PCT- like re-use if the issue date impression was faint

Handling of tickets for all destinations was not possible at important junctions

Accounting reports were sent manually to Zonal Railway headquarters on a 10 day periodicity

Printed tickets : Why Not ?Continue. . .

Self Printing Ticketing MachineA step towards modernisation. . .

In 1990s microprocessor based SPTMs were introduced at selected busy stations of Indian Railways

Advantages of SPTM• Large stocks of pre-printed tickets were not required• The machines printed the details of each ticket on demand on pre-formatted security paper• Paper tickets were eliminated.• SPTM tickets could not easily be faked or re-used.• Universal counters selling tickets for all directions became possible.• Station Accounting was done by the computer, saving manual effort

Drawback of SPTM

In case of change in fares each machine’s programming logic and data base had to be corrected individually by a trained engineer

A passenger could buy a ticket from any counter at a station, cancellation had to be done at the same counter from which the ticket was bought

Revenue accountal data had to still be manually carried to each Zonal Railway headquarter for central accounting which continued to be unreliable and out of date

Unreserved ticketing requires 24x7 operations, thus SPTM resulted in frequent breakdowns because of the tough environmental conditions at railway stations

Birth of UTS

CRIS developed UTS & it was implemented in 2002

UTS is developed on UNIX operating system with C++ language interface for the front-end and SYBASE for the backend database

UTS provides the facility to purchase unreserved tickets three days in advance of the date of journey

Passenger can buy a ticket for any destination from the UTS counter for all destinations which are served by that station

Passengers can cancel their tickets upto one day in advance of the journey from any station provided with a UTS counter

Advantages of UTS

Reduced queue length

Enable advance planning of unreserved journey

Reduced crowds at booking offices and stations, making ticket purchase more comfortable

Allow Indian Railways to plan extra trains and coaches as per trend of sales registered in the system

Unreserved itinerary planning possible, tickets available from any station to any station

Freight Operation Information

System (FOIS)

Freight is the backbone of the Indian Railways and contributes more than 66 per cent of this organisation's earnings

FOIS is an integrated information and management system for controlling and monitoring the multifarious activities in freight operations

Computerized FOIS covers almost the entire Indian Railways network

FOIS enables Continuous cargo visibility

FOIS comprises the Rake Management System (RMS) for handling the operating portion and Terminal Management System (TMS) pertaining to the commercial transactions

Functionality : FOIS

Live monitoring of all freight trains giving their current position in computerised territory and their expected time of arrival at destination

Commodity wise flow of freight trains for customers like power houses, refineries, fertilisers and cement plants, steel depots and public freight terminals, enabling the recipients of consignments to have an accurate forecast of cargo arrivals, giving them adequate time to complete preparatory arrangement to handle the cargo

Monitoring of out bound loaded rakes in the same manner.

Monitoring of detachments from block rakes to track wagons getting detached at a location or missing

Analysis of total demand for rail transport and its logical matching with incoming rakes to optimise supply of empty rakes for loading

Generates as many as 163 managerial reports

Continue. . .Functionality : FOIS

System Architecture

Based on client server

Technology using middle ware & RDMS

Application servers linked to a central database

National Train Enquiry System

(NTES)

Provides information regarding

Arrival/Departure of passenger trains including Expected time of arrival (ETA) of trains

Platform berthing of passenger trains

Journey Planning

Facilities available at stations

Railway Rules

Running Status of Trains (trains running on/behind schedule)

Expected Arrival of all trains at a station during the selected timeframe

Expected Departure of all trains at a station during the selected timeframe

List of all trains running between the selected source and destination stations

Interlinking between Modules

Parcel Management System

Following Functions are covered

Parcel Booking, Cancellation and Loading

Monitoring and tracking of Parcels

Demurrage and Wharfage Calculation

Printing of Parcel labels

Networking of all parcel offices

RFID tags for tracing parcels

Large complex Infrastructure System such as the Indian Railway can benefit greatly from the intelligent use of IT

Using information technology for greater efficiency

Added advantages•Freight revenue enhancement•Passenger revenue enhancement•Improvements in Customer and public service•Investment optimization

Benefits of Digitalisation