Railway Rolling Stock

Rolling Stock

Rolling stock includes locomotives, passenger coaches, goods wagons, and all other types of coaches and wagons such as electric multiple units (EMUs), diesel rail cars, and special wagons such as BOX wagons. This section gives some of the details of passenger coaches and goods wagons.

1 Coaching Stock

The different types of passenger coaches include the electric multiple units that are a part of suburban trains and conventional coaches such as II class, I class, II sleeper, ac three tier, ac two tier and ac I class coaches.

In 1994-95, Indian Railways had a stock of about 3600 EMU coaches and 30,000 conventional coaches capable of carrying a total of about 3.7 million passengers. These coaches have three basic structural designs.

(a)  Integral coaches built by the Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Perambur, Chennai

(b) Integral coaches built by Bharat Earth Movers Ltd (BEML), Bangalore

(c)  Non-integral wooden body coaches made in accordance with the Indian

Railways standard design (IRS)

Some of the salient features of these three types of coaches are given in Table 24.8.

Table 24.8   Salient features of IRS, ICF, and BEML coaches

2 Goods Wagons

Goods wagons are primarily meant for the carriage of goods traffic. Indian Railways presently has a stock of about 0.29 million goods wagons with a haulage capacity of about 10 million t. These goods wagons mostly consist of covered and open wagons as well as special wagons such as BOX wagons for carrying coal and other bulk traffic.

Until the middle of the last century, practically all the goods traffic was transported in general-purpose wagons or in covered, open high-sided, and open low-sided wagons. The standard wagon on the broad gauge was a four wheeler with a 22.19 t haulage capacity, while the standard wagon on the metre gauge weighed 5.69 t and had the capacity of carrying 18.69 t of goods. Recently, a number of new bogie wagons have been designed and put into service, which lay emphasis on a higher payload and on the provision of facilities for the loading and unloading of special type of traffic. These include the BOX, BCX, BOBX, BOY, BOXN, CRT, wagons, etc. It has been decided that only bogie wagons will be put into service on the Railways, as the four wheeler wagon is a non-viable unit in the present context of the bulk movement of commodities. In the above-mentioned classification of wagons, B stands for bogie wagon, C for centre discharge, O for open wagon, X for high-sided (also for both centre and side discharge), and Y for low-sided walls. N is used for air braked, C for covered wagon, R for rail-carrying wagon, and T for transition coupler. The B indication is sometimes omitted as all new wagons are bogie stock.