Top Tweets for #USBRL_Project

Thread Shocking negligence in railway safety! The Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS)/Northern Circle has again failed public trust: i) Cleared two Kashmir rail sections without mandatory load-deflection tests on critical bridges. ii) Now, before even starting the inspection of the Anji cable-stayed bridge (where the load-deflection test hasn't yet been carried out) he claims it’s built with the "highest quality" standards. This shows either incompetence or disregard for safety protocols. The Rules explicitly mandate load-deflection tests for all new bridges—except for replicas of existing ones tested earlier. Yet, this critical safety measure is ignored. Even after two letters to the Railway Minister and Chief Commissioner of Railway Safety, there’s no accountability. Public safety on Indian Railways is being compromised. These are indeed dark days. ...1/2 #RailwaySafety #PublicSafety https://t.co/pKDm28Bn0O

Thread Shocking negligence in railway safety! The Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS)/Northern Circle has again failed public trust: i) Cleared two Kashmir rail sections without mandatory load-deflection tests on critical bridges. ii) Now, before even starting the inspection of the Anji cable-stayed bridge (where the load-deflection test hasn't yet been carried out) he claims it’s built with the "highest quality" standards. This shows either incompetence or disregard for safety protocols. The Rules explicitly mandate load-deflection tests for all new bridges—except for replicas of existing ones tested earlier. Yet, this critical safety measure is ignored. Even after two letters to the Railway Minister and Chief Commissioner of Railway Safety, there’s no accountability. Public safety on Indian Railways is being compromised. These are indeed dark days. ...1/2 #RailwaySafety #PublicSafety https://t.co/pKDm28Bn0O

Extremely high fire safety risk profile of the Kashmir line I was the convener of the task force that was set up by Northern Railway in 2005 to assess the fire safety hazard potential along with other safety and operational requirements of the line. We prepared a detailed report titled: "Review of The Operational Maintenance and Safety Requirements of the New Line Under the Udhampur Srinagar Baramulla rail Link Project" Fires in tunnels can be devastating, such as the fire in the Kaprun tunnel in Austria (161 passengers died and only 11 survived), and the English Channel tunnel fire in the UK which led to closure of this tunnel on the vital rail link between the UK and France for about four months.. We assessed the hazard potential of the Kashmir line to be among the highest in any railway line in the world for three main reasons: i) 87% of the length of the line ( 97 km out of 111 km) is in tunnels. Most of the tunnels are more than 1 km long, several are > 5 km long, and the longest measures 12.75 km. ii) It is a single track line which would make relief and rescue challenging. iii) The line is in a remote mountainous region with poor road accessibility that adds to the challenge. We made recommendations for fire prevention, fire fighting and relief and rescue measures. These included diverse measures such as enhanced fire safety features in trains, fire resistant concrete lining in tunnels, special fire extinguishers, water sprinklers in long tunnels, training of staff, forced ventilation in both the main tunnel and the parallel safety tunnels etc. I hope that the fire safety features of the line (and the trains that will be running on it) are being carefully examined in the ongoing safety inspection. https://t.co/tqFGNYzpYj