This was a singular act of a short sighted policy for getting quick gains while sacrificing long term sustainability, something which perhaps only a truck owner would resort to, when he overloads a 10 tonner by another 5 tonnes and runs it till one day it collapses on the road !

While plugging the leakage of this loss of revenue by installing not only more weigh bridges at originating points, adding to the scores of those already in service would have been the correct step, he instead chose to legalise it by hiking the capacity to load. Undoubtedly it brought in higher revenues, but also set in motion another round of overloading by consignees who had for years been used to getting the better of the system !

Wagons whose carrying capacity had been hiked from 55 to 57 to 62 tonnes in various stages were now being overloaded by another 5 to 10 tonnes, leading to a spate of roller bearing failures. Some of these were fortunately detected in time at the 6 yearly POH (Periodic Over Haul) while others ended up failing on the run. The resultant derailment would lead to catastrophic results and often loss of human life when ever it led to a consequential damage such as a passenger train crashing into the goods train wreck on a double line.

The oft repeated remarks showcasing Lalu’s rustic genius concerning full utilisation of Railway’s assets viz. the humble ‘Wagon’ that ‘if cow is not milked often it will fall ill’ has proved to be a case of ‘over milking’ with the wagons being overloaded much beyond the safe design capacity and ending up as scrap heaps at accident sites all over 64,000 kms. of rail network.

While roller bearing replacements during POH has increased almost two fold, 2005-06 to 2009-10 registered 492 derailments which is 100 per year or almost one every third day. These are only the so called ‘consequential accidents’, a term coined in the 1980’s in order to avoid reporting derailments which did not cause much serious ‘consequential’ damage. Of course the actual tally of unreported accidents/derailments could be much higher !

R.C.Acharya
former Member (Mechanical),
Railway Board