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Despite successfully restoring an out-of-order advanced Diesel-Electric Multiple Unit train using local technology, the Bangladesh Railway now prefers to gauge the performance of the restored unit and take its time before repairing more DEMUs in a similar fashion.
Most of the DEMUs dropped out of service one after another within five years after their procurement from China in 2013, and even when they were still in use, they were unable to turn a profit.
As the DEMUs were gathering dust for years, the railway wanted to restore those but the Chinese suppliers wanted a huge amount of money to provide parts and technical support.
An engineering team of the railway recently replaced the sophisticated Chinese operating technologies with conventional ones in an out-of-order DEMU train to simplify the operation and ease maintenance.
After 30 trial runs, that unit was added to passenger service on a trial basis to see its performance in October this year.
Ten days into that, the Bangladesh Railway sought permission from the Ministry of Railways to adopt short-term and long-term plans to repair and restore the remaining units of the DEMU fleet. They wanted to repair the out-of-order DEMUs one by one on their own budget.
But, the ministry did not entertain the proposal and preferred a thorough assessment of performance and expenditure.
At a meeting held in October over the issue, Railways Secretary Dr Md Humayun Kabir said before taking any initiative of procurement or repair, the plan needs to be included in the Annual Procurement Plan, said a senior official of Bangladesh Railway, who attended the meeting.
The secretary suggested the railway assess the performance of the already repaired DEMU for at least six months before taking any decision of restoring the other units.
Railways Minister Md Nurul Islam Sujan at the meeting asked the railway officials to form a technical committee to estimate the cost of repairing first. He was of the opinion that the railway needs to make the DEMUs operational to ply on short-distance destinations as they are cost-effective.
The secretary informed the meeting that of the 20 trains collected in 2013, 14 are now out of order. The one repaired with local technology is now carrying passengers between Rangpur and Parbatipur at a top speed of 60km per hour.
Md Monjur-ul-Alam Chowdhury, additional director general (rolling stock) of Bangladesh Railway, told The Business Post they have no separate workshop for DEMUs. “No heavy repair works of DEMUs could be done in the past nine years and now we want to repair all of them with local technology. On average, it would cost Tk 50-60 lakh to repair each of the DEMUs,” he said.
If the railway resorted to the importers of the trains for repair, the cost would go more than Tk 5 crore for each of the units.
In 2013, Bangladesh Railway procured 20 sets of DEMUs from China but most of them went out of service within seven years ruining the Tk 598.84 crore project miserably.
According to railway officials, the expensive DEMU trains have a long shelf life but technical failure has made them unusable. The lifespan of these Chinese trains is 35 years but no significant initiatives were taken for the maintenance of the trains as they started to malfunction within years.
In 2017, the government’s project evaluation agency – Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) – in a report said the railway did not hire additional workforce for the maintenance and set up no dedicated workshop as well.
These trains were operated on eleven routes ranging from 22 kilometres to 176 kilometres.