IRCTC introduces new system to track train status

Another new year new gift from IRCTC! This time, the Indian Railways has introduced a new system for the convenience of passengers, wherein they can track live status of their trains. This is made possible as the Indian Railways has linked its locomotives via ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) satellites. Thus, it is now easy for the railways to track the current train status and automatically feed the control charts about trains’ arrivals and departures.
As per a senior official from the railways, this is a new beginning made in new year. Explaining the process, he mentioned that “The train movement information is acquired and fed to the control charts using ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) satellite-based real-time train information system (RTIS) automatically.”

The system was implemented on 8th Jan, 2019, on some of the trains running on Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra-Bandra Terminus, New Delhi-Patna, New Delhi-Amritsar and Delhi-Jammu routes. This new system is definitely going to help modernise the Indian Railways control room by making the railway system more efficient. Earlier, everything was being done manually, and things have now gone automatic and require no manual intervention.
The official further said that the move aims at improving the accuracy of train-running info. Explaining on how the system will work, officials said that there are RTIS device installed in the locomotive that detect the position and speed of the train by using GAGAN geo-positioning system that is developed by ISRO.

Based on this info and logic, “The device sends the train movement updates such as arrival, departure, run through, unscheduled stoppages and mid-section updates to the central location server in the CRIS data centre using S-band Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) of ISRO. After processing in the CLS, this information is relayed to Control Office Application (COA) system for automatic plotting of control charts without any manual intervention in the divisions.”