The Southern Railway will hold an internal inquiry into the incident in which the Vande Bharat train from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram was halted for around one-and-a-half hours at the Kannur station on Monday after the overhead electric lines tripped.
The Southern Railway will hold an internal probe to ascertain the cause of the incident and to prevent the recurrence of the same. The fail-safe system of the train will automatically apply brakes if something stops working.
When the overhead electric lines tripped, the auxiliary control unit (ACU) in the train was turned on to auto mode, applying the brakes, and later it took around one-and-a-half hours for engineers to reset it manually.
In normal trains, the loco pilots themselves can reset the operations from their cabin. This is the first time in the country the Vande Bharat service was affected by a power outage, according to railway officials. The train which was scheduled to reach Thiruvananthapuram Central at 10.35 p.m. finally reached at 12.25 a.m. on Monday, delayed by around two hours and ten minutes.
The data from the train were then downloaded and subjected to detailed scrutiny. Later, the train began its Thiruvananthapuram-Kasaragod service on Tuesday morning late by one hour seven minutes and ended the service at Kasaragod at 2.24 p.m. instead of the scheduled time of 1.20 p.m.
In the return direction also, the train was yet to keep its on-time schedule. The Kasaragod-Thiruvananthapuram service of Vande Bharat is the best-performing Vande Bharat Express in the country with an average occupancy of 183% among the 23 pairs of such trains running across the railway network, according to official data released in the last week of June.
