Clean, safe drive on track

Every morning, even on a Sunday, in the bustling maze of tracks hidden behind the railway overpass in Basin Bridge, dozens of men and women, all decked up for duty, scuttle in like summoned soldiers throughout the day. In no time, the jasmines decorating the women’s hair disappear and their sarees are covered with bright, blue coats.

Equally quick in their makeover are men who emerge out of the locker room, covered in the same navy blue jackets, with a swagger of a football team parading out of the tunnel. Like players shaking hands before the kick-off, the men and women mildly exchange pleasantries and share an odd joke at the assembly point near the office before picking the tools of their choice on hearing the summons of their supervisor. 

Some pick spanners and hammers, and some a long wooden brush (gender disparity has no business here) as the team of two dozen, all fitters and khalasis, ‘led’ by a senior section engineer and junior engineer gradually ‘march’ towards the pit lane in a disorderly fashion as the train designated to them rolls in from Chennai Central for trip maintenance. 

Moments later, a member of the team, mostly a senior, collects three identical copies of invoices for the train’s entry into the yard from the heavily manned outpost. He marks the pit lane in which the train is stabled as ‘occupied’ by fixing a danger board at the front and rear of the train. For the next six hours, they are the custodians of the train and it is their job to refurbish the train at the Basin Bridge train care centre (BBQ). 

BBQ maintains second highest number of coaches after Thiruvananthapuram division in Southern Railway. And the men and women are the warriors who painstakingly do what you would condescendingly call the ‘dirty’ job of cleaning the stain of paan or the toilet pan that you had forgotten to flush during the journey. And if you think that they have signed up to do the smelly job believing that trains were being cleaned by machines, well, you are seriously mistaken.

From clearing an occasional, mutilated, body part of run- over people and cattle stuck in the under gear, to detaching night soil sprayed pressure tubes or even the paan stained window panes, it is the dozen-odd fitters and khalasis who render the trains travel- worthy after every single trip. 

On any given day, the train care centre tucked between the railway overpass in Basin Bridge and Vyasarpadi, and located a couple of hundred meters away from Chennai Central, maintains 400 coaches with several teams, each attending their designated train for not a minute less than six hours per trip maintenance. This reporter had visited BBQ on one such day last week when a section supervisor, again a woman, led the show for six hours when men and women toiled in the locomotives. Ask them, and they have just one word to describe it -pride. 

“It is a matter of pride for us because each team headed by a SSE is given a train for one year. If a brake shoe does not grip the wheel in 3-5 seconds or does not release within 15-20 seconds after it is being applied or released by the loco pilot or guard or even when the passenger pulls the emergency chain, I will be held accountable. The same would apply to the wheel, axle, suspension or even the water supply system in the under gear,” a female fitter attending New Delhi- bound GT Express said. “You may not find many women repairing motorcycles in the city, but here we work on trains,” she sarcastically added, holding a brake shoe in one hand and a spanner in the other. 

Gender aside, the nature of the work they do could make people sweat. “We have young engineers and diploma holders removing ‘soiled’ under gears. It will be difficult at the outset, but if that young fitter does not touch the filth, even hesitatingly, the feed or brake pipes or rather safety of over a thousand people traveling on the train the next day would be at stake,” explained BBQ engineer Xavier *. 

“For an ordinary traveler, the strange frying smell they experience every time the loco pilot hits the brake might be something that would make them pull out their handkerchiefs. However, if a mechanical department staff were onboard the train, he or she would wonder if it were a case of excrement splashing on a hot brake shoe,” remarked fitter Rao*. A quick glimpse of the brake shoe would be sufficient to decide if the shoes require immediate replacement. The standard thickness of a brake shoe is 40mm and Railway Board (RB) insists on discarding any shoe that inches closer to 10mm, but at BBQ they have set 20mm, pushing the safety bar high.

Significantly, it is not just about being aware of the technical knowhow of coaches. One ought to even be gutsy to do the maintaining job. “A mutilated limb was stuck between the axle in the under gear when I crawled in to the pit lane one evening. At first sight, I could not figure it out, thanks to poor lighting. A closer look rattled me. I am sure almost every khalasi had gone through this nightmare. It took me a few days to recover from it, but then my job warrants preparation for such exigencies,” explained another fitter. Under such circumstances, health department would be the first to be approached by the mechanical engineers as the train would not be put on route without a thorough disinfestation. 

Doing a khalasi ’s job at BBQ also requires some amount of sacrifice. Unlike a few other railway men and women, people here ought to be away from the family or rather be at the yard on most holidays, as trains never have a holiday. “We don’t have definite working hours. Operations department will alert us of train arrival and departure, we have to available for six hours after entry into BBQ. It doesn’t matter if we arrive early and the train arrives a few hours late. We miss our family, particularly during holidays, but we are used to it,” reasoned khalasi Chandra Bai. “Braking system alone has to be put through 13 different tests and the work requires extreme prudence and patience. Sometimes it could be tiring,” remarks fitter Immanuel*, who had walked the entire length of a train many a times to check leaks in the brake pressure system.