QUALITY TRACK RENEWAL

Indian Railways (IR) with its massive track length of about 76,000 km has a considerable task of renewing the track structure to cater to the ever increasing demand for speed and axle loads for enhancing the throughput. The track renewal work of providing pre-stressed concrete sleeper track with elastic fastenings, in replacement of old metal and wooden sleepers with rigid fastenings, commenced in early seventies. The job posed many challenges, a developing economy like that of India may have, such as availability of low mechanization level needed for quality renewals; low skill level of available manpower; socio-economic limitations of utilizing the available manpower, in preference to machines; etc. This paper aims at bringing out those aspects of track renewals on IR which have been taken care of in particular to achieve quality in track renewal works whether done by fully mechanized means or by manual methods. Though the issues discussed do get applied to the track renewal works even on advance railway systems, the paper may be of particular interest to railway systems sharing the similar limitations as on IR. For the covering abstract see ITRD E122683.