Only 72pc locomotives of Pakistan Railways functional, says official

ISLAMABAD: Around 72 percent of Diesel-Electric Locomotives (DEL) of Pakistan Railways out of a total of 461 are functional which is not sufficient to run the entire operations of the department.

Pakistan Railways has 332 locomotives in running condition out of a total of 461, while 129 (28 percent) diesel-electric locomotives were non-functional, an official in the Ministry of Railways told APP here Sunday.

Of 129 locomotives, around 41 were under normal overhauling schedules and maintenance. The locomotives will be rolled out after routine schedule maintenance turn by turn, the official said.

He said that 11 locomotives met with an accident on various dates and locations and fabrication work and procurement of spares were under process for these locomotives.

The official said that around 69 DPU class diesel-electric locomotives were held up for repair and need major modification while eight locomotives were temporarily deleted and under condemnation process due to overage.

To a question, he said that Pakistan Railways was planning to procure as many as 25 diesel-electric locomotives for various shunting points across the country which would help to replace outdated locomotives that were to be scrapped very soon.

The project for the procurement and manufacturing of 25 shunting locomotives would be implemented in three years at an estimated cost of Rs 14 billion, he added.

Currently, he said that only 51 locomotives were being operated for this service against the 98 shunting points at various railway stations across the country. Additionally, most of the old locomotives would be discarded due to high maintenance costs.

He said the project was aimed at procuring and manufacturing 25 shunting diesel-electric locomotives of 2000-2200 horsepower HP to replace the overage and uneconomical locomotives.

The official said the old locomotives consumed excessive fuel and in most cases, high horsepower locomotives were under-utilized during shunting operations.

He said that the addition of new locomotives would enhance the capacity of Pakistan Railways by removing the bottlenecks during the shunting of heavy-load freight trains and the placement of freight loads at departure yards in Karachi, Lahore and other places.

“The role of specially designed shunting locomotives was considered the backbone of train formation and train rake replacement at the platform as well as the removal of train rakes from the platform to the washing line and sick lines,” he added.