To ease Eid journey
85 old rail coaches are being repaired at Saidpur
Eighty-five old railway coaches are being repaired at Saidpur Railway Workshop here to cope with the increase in passengers during the Eid holidays.
Workers and officers are working relentlessly to refurbish the damaged coaches so as to be able to carry around 35 lakh additional home-bound passengers.
Divisional Superintendent under Bangladesh Railway West Zone Mohammad Kudrat-e-Khuda told the media that they decided to operate some special trains on the Dhaka-Parbatipur-Dhaka and Dhaka-Khulna-Dhaka routes and other routes under this zone to make the home-bound passengers' journey comfortable.
They have also taken steps to increase transportation capacity of intercity and mail trains by attaching the repaired coaches with them, he added.
“To meet this goal, the workshop set a target to recondition 85 damaged rail coaches ahead of Eid,” Kudrat-e-Khuda said.
“Workers and officials of 29 different workshops are working day and night to repair all the targeted coaches before Eid. Thirty-five of them are fully ready and the rest are likely to be completed within a few days,” he said, adding that it would be possible to carry 35 lakh passengers with the added coaches.
He said the life of rail coaches is usually 30 years and many inoperable coaches were kept abandoned in the yard for a long time, but they are being repaired now.
It takes around Tk 20 lakh to refurbish one coach while it would cost several crore taka to import a new coach, he said.
Senior Assistant Engineer Arifur Rahman said they are facing acute manpower crisis which is hampering the work. “The paint shop needs 221 workers, but there are only 67 at present,” he said.
There are only 1,262 workers in the mechanical and electrical shops when 3,171 are required, said Senior Assistant Engineer Shahjahan Ali Molla at the electrical workshop.
“We have to do complicated repairing work either manually or using traditional tools as we do not have modern machinery and equipment,” said welder Mizanur Rahman.
Jatiya Sramik League's Workshop unit former president Moksedul Momin said, “If we are provided with all the materials, human resource and funds, it would be possible for us to refurbish double the number of coaches.”