Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw asks officers to make rail network ‘tamper proof’

NEW DELHI: Soon after returning from the accident spot in Odisha, railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw instructed Railway Board officers to draw up plans to make the rail network “tamper proof” from external elements. Later, the Railway Board chairman held a meeting with all general managers and divisional railway managers.
Sources said the focus on shielding the railway network from any risk of tampering, particularly the interlocking and signalling systems, comes after suspicion that there could have been “physical interference” with the system during maintenance work at Bahanaga Bazar station.
TOI on Monday had first reported that there was a possibility of some signal maintainer deviating from established protocols while repairing faults. The suspicion on the signal maintainer comes from the fact that there were some technical problems in the signal of a level-crossing close to the mishap site hours before the tragedy.
It was reported that one possibility is that the signal maintainer was in a hurry to complete the task so that trains on the route didn’t get detained, something for which he may have been reprimanded by his superiors and in the hurry, the signal maintainer may have sidestepped due procedures while repairing the interlocked signal.