North East Frontier Railway installs first ever smart Automatic Coach Washing Plant

In a big step towards commitment of water conservation, the Northeast Frontier Railway has installed its first ever Smart Automatic Coach Washing Plant (ACWP) at Kamakhya Coach Maintenance Depot.

• The plant, having multistage cleaning facility was inaugurated o­n 2nd March, 2022 by Shri Anshul Gupta, General Manager of N. F. Railway. 
• This system is eco friendly and provides an efficient and cost effective technique for outer body cleaning with optimum utilization of water.
• Currently, coaches were being manually cleaned which is time & water consuming. 
• The automatic Coach Washing Plant ensures the reduce, recycle and reuse principle through its water treatment plant.
• It uses o­nly 300 litres of water out of which 80% is recycled water and o­nly 60 litres (i.e. 20%) of water is fresh water as compared to 1500 litres per coach in manual cleaning.
• The plant can clean up to 300 to 350 coaches per day. 
• The system is equipped with controlled chemical and soap dilution, which ensures no pollution. 
• It can save around 1440 litres of water per coach in cleaning activities, thus saving 34 thousand litres of water per rake of 24 coaches. 
• Cleaning of coaches through this process also involves saving of manpower, thereby reducing the expenditure.
• The Plant is equipped with PLC based Intelligent Control System which has an auto start system when the train enters the ACWP. 
• It can count the number of coaches, calculate the speed of train and generate a MIS report. 
• It is also capable of self diagnosis and auto-indicates any failure in the system. 
• Thus, the state-of-art system provides better quality of cleaning as compared to the conventional manual system of coach washing. 
• This Railway plans to install 8 more ACWPs at Siliguri, New Jalpaiguri, Dibrugarh, Katihar, Silchar, Naharlagun, Alipurduar and Agartala.
• N. F. Railway has put o­ne more step forward in the direction of leveraging technology to achieve environmental sustainability with the commissioning of this plant at Kamakhya.

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Source: North East Frontier Railway- Press Release | Image Credit (representational): Northeast Frontier Railway