Guwahati/Agartala:

Several northeastern states, including Tripura, Manipur, Mizoram, and Assam (southern part), remained cut off from the rest of the country by rail as railway tracks were waterlogged and damaged after landslides triggered by incessant rain in the aftermath of Cyclone Remal, officials said on Wednesday.

A Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) official said that railway tracks were inundated due to heavy rains or damaged in at least ten places in the New Haflong-Bandarkhal section under the Lumding division in southern Assam’s Dima Hasao district, which is a connecting route to south Assam, Tripura, Manipur, and Mizoram.

“Our engineers and workers are working round-the-clock to restore rail services but heavy rain and adverse weather conditions badly affected the restoration work,” the NFR official told IANS.

He said that full-fledged work could not be started until the rain stopped.

The NFR had cancelled a large number of express, passenger and goods trains bound for south Assam, Tripura, Manipur, and Mizoram since Tuesday.

According to the NFR official, passenger and goods train services have been affected in the region since April 25 owing to heavy landslides causing damage to railway tracks in the Jatinga Lumpur-New Harangajao section under the Lumding division after heavy rains lashed the mountainous Dima Hasao district.

Considering the damaged railway tracks and weak soil in the region, the NFR recently operated a limited number of trains in the daytime on the hilly route, besides regulating long-distance and express trains. The disruptions in services caused a major shortage of transport fuel — petrol and diesel — and other essential goods in southern Assam, Tripura, Mizoram and Manipur. Due to the heavy rain and landslides, highway connectivity was also affected in these states, which are heavily dependent on fuel, essential items, food grains and other commodities from the outside.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

The Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) is developing an artificial intelligence-based device that would be able to read the blinking eyes of drivers and alert them or stop the train in case they are feeling sleepy, according to sources.

In June, the Railway Board had asked the NFR to develop a device that could detect the alertness of train drivers on the basis of blinking of eyes.

The device — Railway Driver Assistance System (RDAS) — will not only sound an alert but also apply emergency brakes in case a driver loses alertness for a certain period of time. RDAS will be interfaced with a vigilance control device to apply emergency brakes, the sources said.

“The device is still in the development stage and trials are on to ensure its proper functioning. The technical team of the NFR is working on it. We hope that it will be ready in another few weeks,” a railway source told PTI.

On August 2, the Railway Board wrote to the NFR and asked it to expedite the in-house development of RDAS. It also said that once the device is ready, it will be fitted in 20 goods train engines (WAG9) and passenger train engines (WAP7) as a pilot project.

All the zones have also been asked to provide their feedback on the working of the system after using it so that further improvements can be made to it if needed.

The Indian Railway Loco Runningmen Organisation (IRLRO), however, dubbed the device a “futile exercise”, saying that all fast-moving trains already have mechanisms to keep drivers alert.

“Every high-speed train engine comes with a foot-operated lever (pedal) which a driver needs to hit once every 60 seconds. In case, the driver fails to do so, emergency brakes are applied automatically and the train comes to a halt. The present system is good enough to ensure that the driver is alert,” said IRLRO working president Sanjay Pandhi.

“I believe RDAS is a futile exercise. If the railways is really serious about the safety of train operations, it should, among other things, conduct studies on aspects such as fatigue, running hours, facilities and rest hours of train drivers.

“In many cases, drivers, including women, do not get any breaks for having food or answering nature’s calls during their over 11-hour duty. If these things are well taken care of, there is no need to have any RADS in engines,” Pandhi said. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)