Soon, go the app-way to track railway assets, trains

Allahabad: Passengers would soon be able to track a train’s live status with a few swipes on their smartphone, thanks to North Central Railway’s (NCR) new app — NAMAN (NCR Asset Milestones Application for Navigation). Apart from tracking a train’s location, passengers will also be able to view information about Indian Railways’ various assets like level crossings, signals and overbridges.
The app was launched as a pilot project and currently only officials of the three divisions of NCR have access to the app.
The app is the brain child NCR’s general manager Rajiv Chaudhary. If successful, the project would be implemented on a larger scale. “Currently, only NCR officials can use the app due to security reasons, but over the next few months passengers too will be able to access the app. Passengers would be able to track real time movement of trains and plan their journey accordingly,” Chaudhary.
NCR’s chief public relation officer Ajit Kumar Singh, said, “The app uses GPS to locate trains and updates railways’ assets through an IOT SIM (a concept based on satellite signal).”
The Android app will be integrated with Google Maps for live tracking trains. Users can also access facts about a particular train’s movement and analyse its performance.
“Say for example, if we see that a train’s movement at a certain route is always slow. We would look into the problem and try finding out a solution,” said Singh. In the first phase of the project, NCR has provided five mobile phones embedded with Android app to officials in Allahabad, Jhansi and Agra.