In Chennai city, metro services disrupted for 3 hours on Friday
Posted on: 24/Nov/2018 10:02:57 AM
Metro trains play an important role in the lives of the many people in Chennai city. The latest news is a technical snag has caused disruption in the metro services for 3 hours on Friday, 23rd November 2018 and this had created difficulties for many commuters. The lack of proper maintenance was cited as the reason for this technical snag. By 9 am the issue with the power supply system was identified and fixed. Later the services of the metro trains were restored.
It is worthy to note that one of the teams belonging to CMRL or Chennai Metropolitan Rail Limited identified that the power supply to OHE or overhead equipment needed for the operation of metro trains was disrupted due to tripping in the upline between Koyambedu and Ashok Nagar stations at around 5am in the morning. One important point is it was in the corridor 2 between Central metro and St Thomas Mount metro. For a time of 3 hours, CMRL operated metro trains only on one line between Koyambedu and Ashok Nagar metro stations as the team was unable to locate the exact spot where the issue was present. The commuters faced many issues as the frequency of the metro trains was reduced and there was chaos.
A regular commuter going for his work spot at Ekkattuthangal expressed his unhappiness and spoke about how there were barely 3 trains that were running for one hour. He then highlighted about the disruption of metro train services and said it has become a regular issue with the metro trains. He criticised about the network and said CMRL cannot expect more commuters to travel using metro trains if they could not maintain their network properly. Another commuter expressed his displeasure regarding the low frequency of metro trains and spoke about how he had waited more than 15 minutes to board a train to go to Alandur and how he preferred metro trains instead of cabs as the metro train was faster than the cabs. He finally spoke about how he was not happy regarding the metro services.
In the months of July and September also the metro train services were disrupted many times due to other several technical issues and corrupt signal software was also one reason. The officials have revealed that still they were not able to find a solution for the issue due to signal software. It is known that point machine is a device that guides trains to switch tracks and on Thursday, 22nd November 2018 metro services were affected due to failure of point machine near Alandur metro station.
It is now brought out by a metro official that technical snag that occurred on Friday, 23rd November, was due to lack of maintenance. Insulator connecting the OHE with the main power system had failed leading to internal short circuit. The exact spot where this issue took place was present between Arumbakkam and Vadapalani metro stations and it took a while to identify this exact spot. The official explained about how the team had to walk across the entire corridor and manually inspect.
