Jugaad Mumbai local

Railway engineers have walled off some doors of a train to create room for extra electric motors - a clever and cost-effective improvisation that has helped boost the train’s power.

As people walked towards a slow local for Borivali on Churchgate’s platform number one on Tuesday afternoon, they grappled with a never-seen-before oddity: almost every second coach of the train had only two sets of doors instead of the usual three.

While many commuters dismissed the anomaly as a new coach design, it was the result of Mumbai’s famed concept of jugaad. Railway engineers have walled off the doors, also referred to as gangways, to create room for extra electric motors - a clever and cost-effective improvisation that has helped boost the train’s power.

So now, the sealed areas of coaches 2, 5, 8 and 11 look like pantry cars of a Rajdhani from the outside.

Over the years, similar tweaks (or acts of jugaad) have become a central feature of the city’s suburban train network. One of the most prominent examples of such resourcefulness can be seen in the conversion of overhead lines from obsolete Direct Current (DC) to energy-saving Alternate Current (AC).

“Converting from DC to AC in Mumbai has been like changing the tyre of a moving truck. It has left us with routes where trains run on DC till Kalyan and then switch to AC,” said a senior railway official. On the CST-Andheri line, the situation is exactly the opposite. Trains run on DC till Kings Circle and switch to AC from Mahim.

“As running different trains on AC and DC sections is not possible, we have seen the birth of the ‘AC/DC train’ - unheard of anywhere in the world,” the official said.

The use of the twin electric system on the same route also produced another phrase: ‘neutral territory’. It refers to the small stretches of overhead wires that don’t carry electricity.

The ‘powerless’ sections have been created to avoid a conflict between the 1,500-volt DC line and the 25,000-volt AC line. So, the next time you see the lights and fans inside your trains going off for a few seconds, don’t be alarmed; the train is just passing through the neutral territory.

Another interesting example of rail jugaad is Central Railway’s retrofitting of old DC rakes to enable them to run on both DC and AC lines. The idea, a stopgap till new rakes arrive, won CR the Railway Ministry’s Innovation Award 2011. “This approach has its downside, with frequent rake failures, but you cannot deny electrical engineers the credit for coming up with the idea,” said another official.

Jugaad has become an “operative word” for the cash-strapped railways, and has even made it to the Railway Ministry’s official dictionary. Jugaad: condonation - the procedure of allowing the bypass of rules if safety is not affected.