ICF Chennai gets Rs 200 crore to switch to LHB coach production

The Railway Ministry has allotted Rs 199.8 crore to modernise the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai as part of a Rs 327-crore project to get the coach-building unit to completely switch over from conventional coaches to safer Linke-Hoffman-Busch (LHB) coaches in the next few years.

The money was allotted in the Union Budget announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on February 1. The Ministry has spent Rs 75 crore in the past two years on the project, and the bigger allocation is seen as a result of the flak the Railways got after the Indore-Patna Express derailed near Kanpur, killing over 150 people.

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, at the time, had tweeted that the Railways would be speeding up the production of LHB coaches, which are designed with better safety features like anti-climbing and anti-telescoping (a railway term for coaches ploughing into each other during a derailment or accident). Conventional ICF-type coaches were getting mangled extensively during mishaps as was evident in the Kanpur derailment.

Currently, the bulk of the LHB coaches are made at the Rail Coach Factory in Kapurthala, Punjab. A new coach-building facility has also started at Raebareli in Uttar Pradesh.

According to the coach production programme of the Railways issued by the mechanical department of the Railway Board, a copy of which is available with DNA, the Railways will make 1,883 conventional coaches and 1614 LHB coaches for the financial year ending March 31, 2017.

The break-up of the 1,883 conventional coaches is such that the Integral Coach Factory Chennai will make 1,118 coaches, while the Rail Coach Factory in Kapurthala will the remaining 765 coaches.