More than four lakh additional seats will be available to passengers every day from October when the railways will move to a technology which will help it generate power from engines, rather than power cars, for lighting and air-conditioning.
Officials say by October 2019, over 5,000 coaches of the Indian Railways will operate on the new technology. It will not only enable trains to shed their power cars and make way for more coaches but also save the national transporter more ₹6,000 crore in fuel bills annually, they say.
Currently, there are one or two power cars at the end of every train in every LHB rake where the electricity to be supplied to coaches is produced in a diesel generator, known as End on Generation (EOG). The new technology, “Head on Generation” (HOG), is used worldwide, by which power supply is tapped from overhead power lines and distributed to train coaches.
