New toy train coaches to shed vestibules

MRINALINI SHARMA

The interior of a vestibule coach brought for the DHR. File picture Siliguri, Jan. 20: The railways have dropped the plan to introduce vestibule coaches in toy trains as they have difficulty in manoeuvring sharp curves and all efforts to solve the glitch have failed. The 10 vestibule coaches brought from Pune two years ago will be converted into regular compartments that have been successfully ferrying passengers along the 80km long serpentine tracks for the past 130 years. This is the second time that an attempt to introduce a new technology in the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway has failed. A move to replace steam engines with oil-fired locomotives to run the toy trains was abandoned in 2002 as it was not suitable for the tracks. “We had tried to introduce vestibule coaches as a new attraction for tourists. But the plan had to be abandoned as the coaches could not bend on the sharp curves on the tracks between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling,” a DHR official told The Telegraph. The DHR had brought the vestibule coaches from the Kurdavari railway coach factory in Pune in August 2009. The two-and-a-half-feet long vestibules (corridors) enable passengers to walk from one coach to another while the train moves. The vestibules had come with glass ceilings through which passengers could get a view of the hills above. Besides, each coach has an airbrake also. The existing compartments of the toy trains are not connected to each other and passengers have to disembark from one coach to board another. Right from the first trial run in 2009, the coaches could not negotiate the bends when the train climbed uphill to Rongtong after leaving the plains of Sukna. Although modifications were made to fix the glitch, the problem persisted. The coaches had been kept at the DHR loco shed in Siliguri Junction since then. “The coaches tend to jerk when they encounter the curves. We cannot put travellers at risk by introducing these coaches for regular runs. So, we decided to remove the vestibules and convert the coaches into regular ones that are currently running on the DHR tracks,” said the official. A few years ago, the Unesco heritage railway had to discard another technology to run the toy trains. Oil-fired engines were brought in to replace steam locomotives to save cost and time, but they were found unsuitable for the uphill rails. Two oil-fired engines were brought in 2002 and after all efforts to modify them failed, they were turned into steam locomotives in 2009. The DHR authorities admitted that it would suffer losses because of the unsuitability of the vestibule coaches for the hill tracks. “Since the vestibule coaches don’t serve the purpose of the hill railway, we have to convert them into regular ones. We need to spend some money for that. In that way, it is a loss for the DHR,” said a DHR official. He said the coaches would be configured after the railway budget of the next fiscal was passed in Parliament.(Telegraph)