Part VI: The Tyranny of Traffic—Keep the man waiting at the gate

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Editorial Comment: We began with one division and one malpractice, and the postbag has not stopped. Over five parts this newspaper webportal has set out the disease in full: “the booking of failures against the men who did not cause them, the myth that the #traffic-cadre alone earns the Railways its bread, the machinery of #gatekeeping, the bill for sinking speeds and lost #freight, and the case for taking the key out of human hands altogether.” The five asked what the #operating department does to the other departments. The two parts that follow ask what it does to its own. This one takes the #Safety consequence, and it ends at the door of a #SPAD. The next takes the accountability. We publish both in the same belief that carried the first five: “an organisation cannot #reform what it refuses to name.”

The series so far—

Parts VI & VII are built on feedback from retired officers and serving supervisors belonging to the traffic, electrical and mechanical departments.

Who owns which cadre?

It is not the sort of question you expect to find still open in an organisation of this age. The establishment is written down. It has been written down since well before Independence, revised, amended, circulated with advance correction slips, and the volumes sit on the shelf of every personnel branch in the country. Yet put the question to a room of serving officers and watch what happens. You will get an argument, and the argument will divide along departmental lines before anybody has finished a sentence.

Feedback after the first five parts of this series kept returning to it. Not as a debating point. As the thing sitting underneath the other things.

The question has two consequences and they are of different orders. One is a matter of #accountability, of who answers for a cadre’s vacancies and penalties and unpaid allowances, and that is the subject of Part-VII. The other is a matter of #safety, and it is the subject of this one.

Three cadres, one department

The men who operate the signals are station masters. The men who guard the train are train managers—the old guards. The men who drive it are loco pilots—the old drivers.

On paper, all three actually belong to the operating department.

In practice, two of them do.

#StationMasters and #Guards are recognised as operating cadre, and nobody has ever troubled to dispute it. The loco pilot is the awkward case. The establishment manual places him in transportation, which is this organisation’s other name for operating. The organisation administers him somewhere else altogether, through traction rolling stock operation, a wing that sits under electrical engineering.

#Part-VII takes up what the #manual actually says, paragraph by paragraph, and what the department does with it. For this part one consequence of the split is enough, and it is the one that kills people.

The vanishing guard

Take the middle cadre first, since it may not be there much longer.

#IndianRailways has learnt to run freight trains without guards. It began as a daylight concession, which is how most of these things begin. It is now unremarkable at night. The End of Train Telemetry device, pushed hard from the traffic side, hangs at the rear of the rake, shows a tail lamp, and does by instrument a good deal of what a man in a brake van was there to do. #Kavach, as it spreads, makes that case easier to argue rather than harder.

Whether this is sound engineering is a separate argument and not the one being made here. The point is narrower. One of the three operating cadres is being engineered out of existence, and the department that owns it has not said so aloud.

That leaves two. The drivers and the station masters.

The lobby and the forecast

Turn now to the #locopilots, and take the grievance in their own words rather than mine.

The All India Locomotive Running Staff Association (#AILRSA) is agitated about duty hours. Nine is the expectation. Twelve is common. On some railways it runs past fourteen. Long hours in a running job are a hard fact of the trade, and the men who took up the trade understand that perfectly well. AILRSA understands it too, as do all the unions.

What they will not swallow is the waste.

A driver is served a #callbook two hours before he is to take a train. He reaches the #lobby on time, because a driver who does not is a driver in trouble. Then he waits. This is pre-departure detention, and it is monitored right up to the Railway Board, which at least establishes that the organisation knows it has a problem. He may wait an hour. He may wait a great deal longer than that. He may then be handed a train that does not move for twelve hours, or one that manages 10-12 kilometres in 12 hours, which as far as a man’s life is concerned amounts to the same thing.

Note what that costs before going further. The man is on-duty and he is drawing his pay for every one of those hours. The railway is buying his time and then throwing it away.

Now consider the call book itself. Two hours in advance is not a courtesy extended to the driver. It is a forecast. Somebody, two hours out, has to know that there is going to be a train.

Who holds the forecast?

The operating department.

Who plans the run? The same department.

So who should be asked to explain a pre-departure detention and long hours or bad runs?

The wrong man in the dock

The operating department is not asked. The explanation for pre-departure detention is called for from, and furnished by, the traction rolling stock organisation, the Traction Operations (#TRO) in the division.

Consider what the TRO actually does. It trains the running staff and it refreshes them. It counsels them, on technical matters and increasingly on mental health. It teaches the road. It runs the lobbies, the running rooms, the food, the beds etc etc. It is the welfare and competence wing for the man who drives, and by and large it does that work decently.

It does not decide which engine goes on which load. It does not sequence trains. It cannot conjure a path out of a saturated section.

And, it is the office required to explain a detention it had no power whatever to prevent.

Readers of “Part I: Tomfoolery of Prayagraj Division”, will recognise the shape of this immediately. There it was a locomotive pulled off a train at the loco side’s request as it was overdue for maintenance and then booked as a failure on the loco account. Here it is a driver wasted in a lobby by a plan TRO had no hand in making, with the explanation demanded of the men who fed him and taught him. The reflex is identical. Only the victim changes.

And the cost is not administrative. #Drivers say so, and their inspectors say so, which is worth rather more. A man called for a run that never came, kept sitting for hours, then crawling ten kilometres through his booked duty, does not simply go home irritated. He goes home worn down. The following day he takes charge of a machine.

The Minister’s question

On 4 November 2025, near #Bilaspur on South East Central Railway (#SECR), a #MEMU working from #GevraRoad to Bilaspur passed a signal at danger and ran into the rear of a stationary goods train. Eleven people were killed. One of them was the #locopilot of the passenger train. The preliminary investigation confirmed what the first few hours had already indicated. The train had gone past a red signal.

In the ordinary course the file closes there. Human error. It has closed there often enough before, and the closing has never once prevented the next one.

To his credit, the Hon’ble Minister for Railways did not let it. He asked why the incidence of human failure on this railway is as high as it is, and he declined the inane answer that this one, like the ones before it, was a mistake made by a man. He asked what this organisation has spent decades arranging not to ask. What is it that leads sane, trained, competent people to make fatal mistakes?

This part has an answer to offer. It is not a comfortable one, and it is not the whole of it.

A man called out on a forecast that did not hold. Hours in a lobby that the railway (public exchequer) pays for and does not use. A duty that may run past twelve and in places past fourteen. A run that crawls, halts, crawls again. And behind all of it is the operating department that should but plans none of his day and answers for none of it.

Fatigue is not a character defect. It is a manufactured condition, and it is manufactured a long way upstream of the man in the cab.

Consider how the Commission of Railway Safety (#CRS) described a comparable failure. At #Domohani on 13 January 2022 the Bikaner to Guwahati Express derailed after a traction motor came away from the locomotive. Nine people died. That locomotive was due a trip inspection every 4,500 kilometres. Its last recorded inspection was on 6 December 2021, and by the day of the accident it had run something close to 16,000 kilometres. The #Commission had two phrases for how such a thing becomes possible. One was “#ghost examinations”, for inspections that exist on paper and nowhere else. The other was a “missing link loco”, for a machine that had simply dropped out of the net that was supposed to hold it. “Part I: Tomfoolery of Prayagraj Division”, set that case out in full, and made the point that the net had been loosened by a department with no stake in tightening it.

The running rooms of this railway are full of missing link men. They drop out in the same manner and for the same reason, which is that the office capable of keeping them in it has never been asked to.

If the #Minister wants to know where human failure is manufactured, it is not hiding. It is sitting in the control office, and it has not once been called on to explain a pre departure detention, a duty that ran past fourteen hours, or a run that made ten kilometres in twelve.

And nobody has to answer for it

That is the #Safety-case, and on its own it would be enough to act on.

But it leaves a harder question standing, and this one does have a written answer. If the operating department will not answer for the loco pilot’s duty hours, his detention or his wasted runs, on what footing does it deal with him at all?

It has a footing. It is precise, it is on the record in the establishment manual, and the department produces it in exactly one situation, which is when there is a man to be punished.

What that document says, and what it is worth to the department that invokes it—is where Part-VII begins.