It is appalling the number of incidents we hear these days about Railway mishaps. While at first we heard about collisions, of late nefarious terrorist activities is forming a trend. I travel around the country pretty extensively and my choices for a safe departure and arrival is slowly shrinking to a glimmer of hope.
At first air travel was considered the safest passage but I shudder everytime I book plane tickets. Sitting in an aircraft to me gives me the sudden fear of a death-capsule travelling through extremely unforeseen hazards be it take-off, cruising or landing. While I thought this is just my silly fears, I see others in the plane holding their arm-rests hard, eyes fluttering and mumbling chants whenever there is a turbulence.
Anyways my blog here is to talk about Railways. Apologies I got a bit side-tracked here. But I just want to emphasis on how crucial it is for people to travel and how unpredictable is the outcome. I was musing about this when it occurred to me that technology has evolved so much that I am sure we can find out a solution for this through simple everyday usage. In a nation of billion aren't we smart enough to figure how to ensure our train-tracks are safe? Most of the times we hear Maoists have blasted a track or Naxals have cut a part of the track ensuring a calamity.
My thoughts on that are we can have repeater cells hosted where ever signals are placed. These repeater cells are placed connected to the tracks to listen for signals that are sent around through the tracks by other repeater cells. If a repeater cell doesn't receive a signal for more than a "threshold" seconds it should alarm by either sending a broadcast to a controller flagging the track to be unusable or atleast turn the signal "red".
While this will definitely not solve the last minute blasts in the repeater segments. It will definitely alarm track outage.
Thoughts?
