Railways line up 5 wagon facilities

Thanks to Shri Sandip Dasverma and Prof. Chitta Baral for sharing this.

The Telegraph (Kolkata), Oct 5, 2010
JAYANTA ROY CHOWDHURY & R. SURYAMURTHY


New Delhi, Oct. 4: The railways plan to set up five wagon factories over the next few years to produce about 6,000-7,500 units annually.

A committee under Ficci president Amit Mitra has proposed units at Kazipet (near Secunderabad) and in Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Haldia, besides the factory being set up in joint venture by Steel Authority of India Ltd and RITES at Kulti, near Durgapur.

Each of the four factories — that will be set up in a public-private partnership model — will produce 1,200 wagons.
According to a vision document prepared by the railways earlier this year, 18,000 wagons are produced in a year now against a demand of 25,000. The capacity needs to be stepped up to 75,000 by 2020.

A spurt in demand is likely once the freight corridors come up.
The high-speed corridors carrying goods trains will pass through industrial enclaves, which will use them to transport raw materials and finished products.

The western freight corridor will connect Delhi’s Tughlakabad and Dadri inland ports with Mumbai’s Jawaharlal Nehru sea port, running through Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The eastern corridor will cover 1,806km, from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni near Calcutta. It will be extended further to serve the proposed deep sea port in the Calcutta region, besides Haldia, and mainly cater to coal and steel traffic.
The Haldia and Guwahati factories are looking for partners who will bring in new technology as well as finance. “Haldia and Guwahati are in the immediate zone, Bhubaneswar has some land problems, but as you can see the railways is spreading its investments,” Mitra told The Telegraph.
In her two rail budgets, railway minister Mamata Banerjee had proposed the procurement of 18,000 wagons each fiscal.