Talgo Train And Metrino Pod :-The Rail and Road in 21st century India:-
One of the major focus areas of the railway minister so far has been to reduce travel time by increasing the speed of the trains. The bullet train is a long term project. In the short term, he is focusing on how speeds can be increased without having to spend a bomb on revamping current infrastructure.
Towards that objective Indian Railways conducted the first trial run of Spanish Talgo train on the Bareilly-Moradabad rail route. Though it is capable of hitting a maximum speed of 200 Km/hour, the oscillation test was conducted at 115 Km/hr. The next trial will take place on the Mathura-Palwal route at a maximum speed of 180 Km/hr. This will be followed by the time validation trial on Delhi-Mumbai corridor. It is expected that the travel time will come down by at least five hours for this route when Talgo coaches are used.
Talgo Train :-
The concept
If one notes a racing track, the curves are ‘banked’, i.e. the curves are raised on the outer side, which makes the vehicle run inclined on them. If one doesn’t raise the outer side, a fast moving vehicle might fly off outside. This banking is done for a certain speed, if you bank too high and drive slow on it-one might just topple inside (think of a velodrome-can a cyclist drive slow on the curve?). Trains being big vehicles, would not easily fly off or topple easily.
The IR network is shared between slow moving freight and faster passenger trains. This created problems for engineers as they have to cater not only to the fast moving rajdhani/ shatabdi type trains but also to the slow moving goods trains.
When the train travels at faster speeds on curves not banked for that speed, the passengers in the train are discomforted, which limits the maximum speed potential of each curve. Trying to run faster trains on existing tracks is thus not easy. For high speeds, say 250 or 300 kmph, new tracks with flatter curves are generally laid.
For higher speeds, this discomfort can be overcome without modifying the tracks, if the vehicle is also tilted by right amount when the curve is negotiated. This tilting can be done by using actuators which tilt the vehicle body when a curve is sensed. Talgo comes with a natural tilting technology, a clever concept, where the superstructure of the coach tilts while negotiating a curve without powered actuators.
Talgo hopes to use tilting trains to negotiate curves at higher speed and achieve better run times.
Talgo makes coaches with patented design of wheel assemblies. Unlike, conventional rolling stock, the two wheels are not mounted on a fixed axle. Thus, the two wheels can rotate independently of each other, which reduces lateral forces (forces which sway the vehicle perpendicular to the direction of motion).
The energy saving of 30% as talked in several press releases is a bit overplayed and needs to be taken in with due caution. Another key aspect is the light weight of the coach due to use of aluminium and its alloys. This reduces the deadweight of the coach and makes it more energy efficient. This aspect of coach weight reduction can be implemented on all types of stock even without Talgo’s patented wheel arrangement.
Energy saving from a passive rolling stock occurs essentially on account of its lower mass (less weight to be accelerated and braked-more pronounced if sections are undulating or graded). Another energy saving component is the reduced number of wheels. Reduction of wheels happen by making two coaches share a pair of wheel under the vestibule.
#1 Physics mandate that the curves on road/tracks be banked (for certain speeds), otherwise a fast moving vehicle may fly outside (or topple inside if too slow). But trains are big and heavy and won’t topple easily but can cause discomfort to passengers. So running faster trains on Indian tracks can be risky. However, Talgo comes with natural tilting technology which tilts it by the right amount when it senses a curve. So, travel time can be cut drastically with minimum investment.
#2 The coaches are energy efficient due to two reasons. First, because of the light weight thanks to the use of aluminium and its alloys in its manufacturing. Second, because of the reduction in number of wheels as two coaches share a pair of wheel under the vestibule.
Another advantage is that due to its low weight, the train will accelerate more with less power requirement.
#3 A typical-20 coach Rajdhani has 80 axles, whereas a 37 Talgo coach train of similar length would have about 37-40 axles. So, Talgo saves on number of axles per train.
There are some concerns too.
#1 The Talgo coaches are shorter, about 13m as against LHB (Current Indian Railway stock) of 22 m. So, a 37-coach Talgo train is considered equivalent to a 20-coach Rajdhani.
#2 Talgo is a bogie-less design. It has been around for a long time but no major operators and manufacturers have employed it.
#3 Currently, a defective coach can be detached and a new one attached enroute. But in Talgo trains, this is not a possibility as two coaches share a pair of wheel.
However, the prospective benefits currently outweigh the concerns. Suresh Prabhu is targeting an investment not easy to come by. The biggest benefit of Talgo is that it obviates the need to lay new of Rs 8 lakh crore over the next five years to completely transform the railways but this is tracks and drastically reduces the travel time.
If the tests are successful, it will usher in new era for the Indian railways and train passengers.
Metrino Pod taxis
Transport minister is experimenting with interesting ideas too. One such idea is introducing Metrino pods on the Delhi-Gurgaon corridor. Last month, the Union Government gave its nod to the National Highway Authority Of India (NHAI) to go ahead with the project.
The pod taxi service is cost-effective, takes a lot less time to build compared to metro and monorail and doesn’t need any significant infrastructure investment.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. Crunch of funds has forced both Prabhu and Gadkari to go for these cost-efficient options.
It’s a long way to go before we can pass judgments on the successes or failures of these experiments. For instance, the jury is still out on Metro even after its debut 15 years ago.
But one thing is sure. Both the ministers are trying their best to drag the Indian transportation to the 21st century.
Rare seabird flies into camera view
The earliest record of the bird is from the Andaman Islands dating back to 1870s at Ross Islands.White-tailed tropicbird (Phaethon lepturus), rare in India.
A paper on Indian Rarities 1 (in the journal Indian Birds: Journal of South Asian Ornithology) that said the bird, a pelagic, has been recorded eight times in the past 150 years in the Indian sub-continent. Pelagic birds frequent a zone of the sea or lake that is neither close to the bottom nor near the shore.
Phaethon lepturus is the smallest of the three tropicbirds recorded in Indian subcontinental waters. The species is a known resident on the Maldives archipelago and has been recorded as a vagrant visitor to the coasts of India and Sri Lanka in the past.
North Eastern Council likely to be upgraded as resource centre
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during the recently held the North Eastern Council Plenary meeting, hinted at the possibility of upgrading the North Eastern Council (NEC) as a state-of-the-art resource centre capable of meeting the aspirations of the people.
- He also dedicated to the nation the Doppler Weather Radar at Cherrapunji.
- The North Eastern Council is the nodal agency for the economic and social development of the North Eastern Region which consists of the eight States of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. The chief ministers and governors represent them.
- The headquarters of the council is situated in Shillong, and it functions under Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region(DONER)
- The North Eastern Council is a statutory body.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.