Kolkata: East-West Metro gets rail board nod

KOLKATA: The Railway Board on Friday cleared the path of East-West Metro’s 5.5km Sector V-Salt Lake stadium commercial run, by sanctioning the rolling stock to cruise at maximum speed of 80kmph.
Senior officialsof Kolkata MetroRail Corporation (KMRC), implementing the Rs 8,575-crore project,saidthatthey received the sanction on Friday morning. The Railway Board letter says the clearances were being accorded subject to theterms andconditionsof theResearch Design and Standards Organization (RDSO) in its interim speedcertification, and suggestions by the commissioner of railway safety (CRS) that will issue the final safety clearance. KMRC has procured nine rakes from the Bengaluru-based PSU, BEML, for the first phase of commissioning.

E-W Metro, which was headed for an Aprilend-early Maylaunch, ran intolastminute glitches asthe internationalfirm contracted to provide software integration with the signalling network missed its 31March deadline to make the system infallible. The firm, which is responsible for providing the communication-based train control (CBTC), a signalling system that uses telecommunications to automatically run the East-West trains like those of Paris and Shanghai, is still carrying on safety tests. CBTC brings down the waiting time for passengers to around 90 seconds.

Before welcoming passengers on board, Kolkata’s Line 2 must undergo a rigoroustesting andcommissioning process, to ensure the Metro is fully functional and safe. On 21 January, it achieved safety certification from RDSO, the nodal agency nominated by the ministry of railways for the conduct of oscillation trials.
The next deck was the Railway Board, which was due to give its nod in March. The ultimate certification must come from the CRS. But before CRS begins its trials, East-West must get an Independent Safety Assessment (ISA) report card from the French “certifier”, a third party appraisal body authorized to doubly check the necessary safety level of thetrain system, according to international standards.
TheFrenchteam washere in thefirst week of March and detected troubleshooting problems during its tests. “Since then, the international firm has been conducting trial runs and addressing the software-related shortcomings pointed out by the experts as they cropped up during the tests and referred to their experts in US andFrance,sothatthey could send back solutions,” explained an official.
The company is contracted to provide software integration between trains, signalling system, tracks and platform screen doors. It has different sets of experts to handle different parts of the software, stationed in Italy, US and France.
“CRS will needthissafety concurrencebeforestarting itstrials. ‘Certifier’ has given its preliminary report, but it can’t give the final certificate unless the internationalfirm rectifiesthesnags ithas pointed out in its report,” the official said.