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| May 31, 2005 | Tuesday | Rabi-us-Sani 22, 1426 |
Rs21.3bn sought for PR rehabilitation
ISLAMABAD, May 30: The government is likely to approve Pakistan Railways’ Rs21.3 billion investment plan in the budget for 2005-06 to make the organization efficient and help reduce its accumulated losses. Official sources told this correspondent that the investment plan sought rehabilitation of and improvement in the main rail track, procurement of 25 electric locomotives and procurement and manufacturing of 1,000 high capacity bogies.
According to the plan, the rehabilitation and improvement of track (revised) project will cost Rs11.1 billion and is designed to carry out track rehabilitation of 1200km main line and important branch lines.
Its main objective is to rehabilitate the track on extended part of main corridor from Karachi to Peshawar to make the section fit for a higher speed of 140 kilometres per hour.
It will also help improve operational efficiency of the organization to achieve the target set down for handling the 7.2 billion TKM and 23 billion PKM passenger traffic by the year 2009-10. The rehabilitation programme also includes the procurement of 69 diesel locomotives of 2000/3000 horse power, rehabilitation of 36 GMU-30 diesel locomotives, replacement of 29 electric locomotives, rehabilitation of 450 passenger coaches, procurement/manufacturing of 175 passenger coaches, conversion of 100 economy/second class coaches into lower AC, manufacturing of 50 bogies, procurement/manufacturing of 2,200 high capacity wagons and doubling of Lodhran-Multan Cantonment-Khanewal track.
The procurement of 25 other electric locomotives of 3000kw will cost Rs4.8 billion and provide reliable and economical transport service to the people with little damage to environment.
The government has been informed that if the 25 electric locomotives were not procured, the target of 27,800 passenger load and 12,700 metric tons for fright traffic for the year 2010-2011 would not be met. It was told that the requirement of locomotives was high as 397 locomotives would become overage by 2,011 after running for 20 year. However, only those locomotives would be condemned which have completed 30 years of service life instead of 20 years.
The procurement/manufacture of 1000 high capacity bogies is the third project submitted by the Pakistan Railways, which will cost Rs5.3 billion. The project forms part of the rolling stock programme of Pakistan Railways.
Its existing fleet of wagons comprises 18,175 vehicles, 72 per cent of which consist of 4-wheel wagons and 88 per cent of them will become overage by the end of 2011.
With the acquisition of high capacity wagons equipped with air brake, central coupler and rolling bearing, improvement in availability of wagons, operational and maintenance handling and reduction in dead load will be achieved and Pakistan Railway will be in a better position to utilize the available revenue earning capacity of the system.
The government was informed that due to obsolete design of present fleet of container wagons, Pakistan Railways was bound to transport containers in an uneconomical manner as containers having a load of more than 24 tones could not be loaded on the 4-wheelers and had to be transported on bogie stock.
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