Besides accelerating the speed of construction, the machine helps in careful handling as well as placement of rails and sleepers, achieving high initial quality in laying of tracks.

Indian Railways bets on track laying machines! Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways is betting big on huge track laying machines to expedite the work for the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) projects. The New Track Construction (NTC) machine offers continuous action assembly line kind of track laying with accuracy and high speed. In each shift, the output of the new track laying machine can be as high as 1.5 km. In normal conditions, the track laying can be done for maximum 200 metres to 300 metres.

Besides accelerating the speed of construction, the machine helps in careful handling as well as placement of rails and sleepers, achieving high initial quality in laying of tracks. Within the track, the entire supply of new sleepers and rails is being laid by mechanised operation. To allow error-free mechanized track laying, a cord is fixed at 2.5 m from central axis. Following are some advantages of the new track laying machine:

The handling of rails and sleepers are fully mechanized from loading, transportation to linking at site. Compared to manual or semi-mechanized methods, this method will avoid initial stresses induced in rail.

Since rail panels of 260 m are supplied from manufacturing plant itself under controlled conditions with two flash butt welds for each panel and handled through hydraulically operated system, only eight welds are required per single track km in this method, which increases track safety to a great extent.

With this method of laying tracks, physical damages to sleepers are reduced to great extent. Also, safety at work site has been increased as well. Since the laying of the track will be done automatically by the machine, the disturbance will be minimum. Also, this will eliminate manual errors and rework.

During Rail pulling & sleeper dropping operations, there will be no disturbance to the Ballast bed.

As many as seven NTC machines are being used in DFC alignment, four machines in Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor and three machines in Western Dedicated Freight Corridor.