KARACHI: The federal government will arrange Rs 874 million through foreign funding for 'Re-commissioning of 05 Nos. Accidental Diesel Electric Locomotives' project.
According to working paper of Planning Commission for the project, available with Business Recorder, the project has been approved at the total cost of Rs1.261 billion recently. The project cost includes Rs874 million through foreign financing and Rs.386.932 million through local resources.
The project implementation period is two years, which would start from July 2020 and is expected to be completed in June 2022, the official document showed.
Official document indicated that railways require an efficient and reliable locomotive fleet on sustainable basis to achieve its revenue targets by eliminating operational delays. However, allocation of funds for the normal maintenance of locomotives remains quite inadequate against the actual requirement.
As such it is not been possible to keep the Pakistan Railways Locomotive fleet in optimum operational condition according to international standards to maintain the D E Locos with 85 percent availability per day on line.
Through this project, a total of five stabled / accidental D E locomotives will be re-commissioned in order to include these locomotives in the system of Pakistan Railways for train operations.
Pakistan Railways currently has the capacity to haul annually 8.080 billion Tonnes freight and 24.903 billion passengers. It earned Rs 19 billion in freight sector and Rs 26.330 billion in passenger sector during 2017-18.
To further improve freight traffic carrying capacity, re-commissioning of these
locomotives will be carried out.
Pakistan Railways at present has a total fleet of 474 locomotives but the number of locomotives available for operations is 333 for all types of train operations including passenger, freight and departmental services (shunting, ballast deliveries, relief).
The worst hit area was the freight train operations as availability reduced from 97 in 2007-8 to only 12 in 2012-13 while the commitment for passenger trains also decreased from 184 in 2007-8 to 93 in 2012-13.
Although that scenario is over, documents stated, because of Pakistan Railways' untiring efforts and support of PSDP funded projects for special repairs of locomotives during 2014 till 2018 and the procurement of new locomotives during 2017-18 but still the sustainable point is yet to achieve and this project will help in sustaining the availability and reliability figures of the locomotive fleet as these 05 locomotives are either most recently procured or rehabilitated and are considered to be the most reliable classes of DE Locomotives over the years.
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