Sahiwal, Jamshoro power plants: railways to procure 20 DE locomotives for coal freight

Pakistan Railways (PR) is to procure 20 Diesel Electric (DE) locomotives to be used in transporting coal for making Sahiwal and Jamshoro power plants operational. Sources informed Business Recorder that specification for 20 locomotives of (2000-2500 HP) are being finalised and international tenders will be floated shortly. Two of the locomotives will be in Completely Built Unit (CBU) while 18 in Completely Knocked Down (CKD) form.
Railways last month signed another agreement with General Electric Company-an American company assembling diesel engines-for 55 D.E locomotives of (4000-4500 HP) that would start supply in 16 months. The procurement of 75 D.E locomotives to replace 242 over-aged engines (54 percent of present fleet of 451). According to new condemnation plan 262 locos will be condemned up to 2019-2020. The officials maintained that as per revised business plan, in the light of vision 2025, share of Pakistan Railways in national transport sector will increased from 4 percent to 20 percent by year 2025. To increase one percent share, at least 25-30 locos are required. Hence the subject project to procure new locomotives is inevitable.
According to the PC-1 of the project meant for coal transportation by Rail to Jamshoro, the existing track requires improvement/rehabilitation with provision of additional lines for eight trains per day to meet transportation of 6.60 million tons of coal from Karachi to Jamshoro power plant.
The existing track between Port Muhammad Bin Qasim and Bin Qasim Railway station is in deplorable condition requiring complete rehabilitation with new Pre-Stressed Concrete (PSC) sleepers and ballasting of track. The line capacity of existing track is insufficient to meet the requirement of future freight traffic especially coal. In addition to this, a new track along with extension of existing bridges has been proposed parallel to the existing one, in order to have double line to facilitate directional traffic.
The PC-1 further proposed a new railway line to be laid from Kotri to Akhundabad to maintain uninterrupted flow of freight. For this purpose, existing bridges will be suitably extended. The procurement of 10 locomotives (4000-4500 HP) and 500 new design high speed/capacity hopper bogie wagons (491 wagons and 09 brake vans) is essential to meet the demand for the transportation of 6.60 million tons per annum from Karachi to Jamshoro Power Plan via Kotri. The present fleet owned by Pakistan Railway contains mostly overage and obsolete design wagons which are not capable to operate at high speed resulting into higher turn round. New design wagons, fitted with roller bearings and air brakes etc, will work at higher speeds to achieve lesser turn round and down time for maintenance. This will lead to better operational efficiency and effective utilisation of assets.
At present, Pakistan Railway has 16179 wagons. 67% of these (10887 wagons) consist of 4-wheelers which are being phased out. Currently Pakistan Railway does not have any High Capacity Hopper wagons. Pakistan Railways has only 625 ballast trucks, out of which 122 are already over-aged. Besides these will have a maximum permissible speed of 55 KMH which makes them operationally unviable. b). The present capacity of Pakistan Railways to carry freight traffic is approximately 5 billion tons annually, which is not sufficient to meet the needs of developing economy which requires growing volumes of freight to be transported across the length and breadth of the country, maintained in the PC-1 of the project.