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Indian Railways are the largest rail
network in Asia and the world’s second largest under one
management. Criss-crossing the country’s vast geographical spread, Indian
Railways are a multi-gauge, multi-traction system covering over 1 lakh track
kilometres,300 yards, 2300 good sheds and 700 repair shops. Its rolling stock
fleet includes 8300 locomotives, 39,000 coaching vehicles and 3.5
lakh freight wagons. Its work force is 1.65 mllion and it runs some
11,000 trains everyday, including 7,000 passenger trains. Freight traffic on
Indian Railways has registered an impressive growth in the last four decades.
Increase in the last few years have been particularly striking. The outlook for
2000 AD is an increase of another 63% in freight and 60% in passenger traffic.
Harnessing the potential of these vast and widespread assets to meet the
growing traffic needs of developing economy is no easy task and makes IR
a complex cybernetic system. Over the years, Railways have built up an
elaborate and well established manual information system to help
them monitoring their moving assets. Supported by a dedicated voice
communications ions network, it collects and transmits information from the
remotest corners of the country to control centres, at the highest level. The
size and complexity of their operations, growing traffic and changing
technologies, placed inevitably a heavy burden on this manual in formation
system. Need for its modernization was therefore felt for sometime.
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