You'll find companions wherever you go, when you travel in Trains, family or solo.

* Had train movement permitted with broken check rails, the instruction to move at lower speed say 5/10kmph would have been there in the standard operating practices, and the LP would not have insisted for written order to run the train at 5kmph over the affected area. Is IR experimenting with a prohibited practice, which ultimately lead to derailment of the fifth train after first 4 trains passed over??? This is pretty serious.
* Root cause of these accidents is the past practice of IR/RMs to flag off new trains in large numbers without augmenting the track (mostly for political gains) which has resulted in very high traffic (170% of rated capacity) and no scope to manage any breakdown. IR management is...
more...

forced to clear the traffic in caution but unsafe way and accidents happen. To ask resignation of current RM would be penalising him for the mistakes of hid predecessors. Mr. Prabhu who took a large number of steps to help improve the situation including accelerated doubling, fell prey to our illogical ritual of "moral responsibility" to be owned by RM.

Suresh Prabhu should have also increased number of grade C staff so that ground level monitoring could improve, but he didn't.
after 2013 RRB has pretty much stopped conducting its entrance exam for garde C staff, and with thousands of vacancies pending, ground level monitoring is deeply affected. If wage bills owing to 6th and 7th CPC were issue then he could have opted for a similar structure like that of banks, whose salaries are decided by a different board, thereby keeping wage bills in control, or going for increased mechanization. Neither of which happened, so a part of blame does fall on his shoulders.
Don't...
more...

forget IR is heavily centralized, with most decision making power concentrated at top. He and the RB have a huge share in the blame for what has happened

* IRly is a black box as other do not know much about Rly operation. So called 2 lac vacancies have to be studied in detail in current situation in order to ascertain that they really exist? The number of safety and inspection posts were fixed in an era when there were wooden sleepers and two rail joints every 13 meter of rail track.
* Spikes (Nails) used to came out of wooden very often due to huge impact of moving train, especially of large wheeled steam locomotives, and had to be frequently hammed back to original position. These have been replaced by pendrol clips over concrete sleepers which remain in place and do not require any hammering. So efforts required...
more...

is reduced by several times.
* Today there are long welded rails & continuously welded rails with two rail joints in every 1-10 kms! Number of joints which need to be tightened and maintained have reduced to bare minimum. So the job of maintenance has gone down drastically but the number of post have not been reduced.
* A large number of lower staff is working as domestic help at the houses of superiors as has been reported. That practice need to be stopped and the track monitoring have to be done with mechanical and automatic means like track recording cars, drones etc. With modernisation grade D,C matric pass 12th pass type vacancies shall shrink and vacancies for professionally skilled staff to operate & maintain the modern machines shall increase.
* Not implementing pay commission (7th) is not an easy task and no RM has courage to do it!! For that IR has to be converted into PSU or corporatised.
* It does not sound good but is true that- IR shall have to delegate unskilled jobs to more efficient private sector, else it will remain in bad financial condition and continue to lose its market share to inefficient and highly polluting road & air modes. Its manpower cost of IR is already sky high at about 70% of total revenue generation and further increase is highly detrimental to its finances.