Locomotive has more lines of code than Tesla: Wabtec’s Nalin Jain

BENGALURU: We don’t hear much about locomotives becoming digitalised. But just like cars are getting digitally transformed and moving towards self-driving, so are trains. And Nalin Jain, as president of the digital electronics business of Wabtec, one of the world’s biggest locomotive makers, is at the centre of this digitalisation.

Jain says there are more lines of code in a locomotive today than in a Tesla car, and digitalisation is helping on three fronts. The first is to reduce two of the biggest cost elements – fuel and crew. The second is to run more trains on a network, without compromising safety. And the third is to ensure timeliness – which is becoming crucial as rail freight moves increasingly towards consumer products that the likes of e-commerce companies want delivered in a fixed time, unlike traditional products like coal and steel where buyers manage delays by keeping inventory.

A solution called Trip Optimiser acts like a cruise control for locomotives, and just like cruise control in cars, in diesel locomotives it saves 8-10% of fuel. The driver needs only to set the destination, say Delhi to Dehradun, and the system obtains the trip profile – the track profile, gradient, stations, etc. The cruise control kicks in when the locomotive reaches a speed of 9 miles per hour. The driver may need to make occasional interventions because things could change on account of the complexity of the network. Jain says Trip Optimiser runs on over 20,000 locomotives around the world, and saves about 500,000 gallons of fuel every day.

More recently, Wabtec has been combining Trip Optimiser with another technology called Positive Train Control (PTC), a continuous communication channel between the locomotive and the back office control centre. If the control centre notices any changes, or anything that is not right, it alerts the locomotive, allowing the driver to take action. And in case the driver does not act, the PTC system takes over the train. With this safety feature in place, Wabtec is now piloting a project in the US where the Trip Optimiser drives the train from start to finish, and not only at speeds over 9 miles per hour. This will improve fuel efficiency further.

The Trip Optimiser plus PTC system should soon be able to reduce the number of drivers from two to one. Regulations currently require that one driver must monitor messages from the control centre and even do some paperwork, while the other driver operates the train. “We are trying to see how those directives can be fed into the system directly and are able to communicate with the train, which would mean that you can manage operations with one driver,” Jain says. Indian Railways, he says, should look at adopting the system, “a proven collision avoidance system that is installed and running on 75,000-plus miles.”

Jain’s team is also working on another ambitious project which will allow the train system to move away from the current fixed block signalling to what is called moving block signalling. Jain says once that is perfected, the train would become fully automated and it could run without human drivers. It would involve not only the train communicating with the control centre, but also the trains in front and behind it. Currently, an entire track is divided into fixed blocks, trains have to maintain a fixed distance between each other, and the number of trains allowed in a block is determined by the length of the train and the distance it is expected to maintain between the train in front and behind. The new system would allow trains to calculate the distance they need to maintain among themselves, based on their speeds and lengths, enabling more trains to run on the same track.

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