East Central Railway (ECR) in collaboration with ISRO will now be able to provide real-time information about the movement of mail and express train to passengers through Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).
The “Real-time Train Information System” (RTIS) has already been installed on 172 locomotives of mail and express trains including the Rajdhani and other premier trains travelling to destinations like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Goa.
What is RTIS
Automatic acquisition of train movement data on Indian Railways is a key requirement for improving operational efficiency and quality of passenger information. This requirement gained greater significance after implementation of ICT based Control Office Application (COA) on all divisions of Indian Railways. Accordingly, Railway Board sanctioned a work “Real-time Train Information System (RTIS)”. The project is being executed by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) in collaboration with ISRO. The trials for this system using GSAT series satellite have been done on New Delhi-Guwahati (NDLS-GHY) and New Delhi-Mumbai (NDLS-BCT) Rajdhani routes jointly by CRIS and SAC/ISRO. The trials have been done to ascertain the overall workability of the system, assessment of S/C bandwidth required on GSAT transponders and for finalization of system design & specifications for the rollout. Several successful trial runs were done and now the system is to be rolled out on Indian Railways. The roll-out of RTIS system shall be phased out appropriately. Indian Railways has about 5500 electric locomotives, 6500 diesel locomotives and 3000 EMU/ MEMU /DMUs. About 600 locomotives are added every year. Passenger carrying electric locomotive sheds serving the golden quadrilateral and diagonals except Mumbai – Chennai corridor and freight electric locomotive sheds serving the Delhi – Mumbai and Howrah – Chennai corridors shall be covered in Phase-1.
RTIS Architecture:
Benefits of RTIS:
• Automatic capture of train running Information & automatic plotting of Control Charts in COA
• Stress free work conditions for train controllers
• Optimum utilisation of resources
• Accurate train running information to passengers
• Improved Customer Services
• Richer MIS for management
This would be installed in the form of kiosk for evert traveller to be acquainted with the required information. Indian railways has laid a lot of improvements in it’s infrastructure and this is gradually surfacing up in the form of benefits. Also, food availability used to be a major concern, thanks to e-catering services which enables every traveler to order food online in trains.