Railways to set up 3rd water recycling plant in Chennai

CHENNAI: Gearing up for water scarcity in the future, Southern Railway is installing a water recycling plant at Tambaram coaching terminal as well. SR already has two recycling plants at Basin Bridge (Puratchi Thalaivar Dr MGR Central) and Gopalaswamy yard (Chennai Egmore), which have saved close to 471 million litres since their installation in 2015.
The railways depends on Chennai Metrowater for much of the water it requires.For the past year and a half, water is also being brought in wagons from Chengalpet due to lack of rainfall in Chennai.
A lot of water is needed for cleaning coaches and filling their tanks for passengers to use. For example, a 24-coach train needs 21,600 litres of water to fill its tanks at 900 litres per coach. And, 350 litres of water is needed to clean the inside and the outside of a coach.
The recycling plants at Basin Bridge and Gopalaswamy yard have a capacity of 10 lakh and 2.5 lakh litres a day. All the water that is used for cleaning the trains and also the stations is channelled into the plants where it is treated and then re-used.
Another important water conservation project is installation of high pressure jet cleaning systems at both the Chennai yards, which would reduce water consumption. “This would help focussed cleaning of the coaches quickly and use less water,” said a senior official.
Other water-related projects are also being given a quick go-ahead in Chennai division of Southern Railway.
For instance, the division has almost finalised quick watering system for coaches at four stations — Central, Egmore, Katpadi and Tambaram.
A quick watering system uses high pressure pumps to re-fill water inside coaches within five minutes. This is important because when water levels are low, the conventional systems take longer to fill water in coaches. This affects punctuality of trains as they have to stop at wayside stations longer to fill water.
Such systems have already been installed at Erode and Vijayawada, which are important junctions for many long distance trains.
An automatic coach washing plant like the one in Chennai metro rail’s yards is also coming up at the Tambaram terminal.