Train 18 series 22..bogies, the heart of the project

Was everyone sitting idle waiting for the transformers? Not at all. If Train 18 was our magnum opus, the transformer was the superstar, and if female, the prima donna. There were numerous actors and actresses hiding behind the diva. It proved to be a boon in disguise. Had the transformers come in September, a whole lot of equipment and components would still be undelivered or at least not installed. Would the train still have gone out in September? Difficult to say but I would think that any attempt to despatch the train, say a couple of weeks, earlier than when it was eventually readied would have been fraught with the risk of the quality taking a hit, what with the pressure of delivery on a phalanx of manufacturers. We were in September and panelling was far from ready, toilets were half done, forged and cast bogie components were very late in getting ready, the luggage racks were not installed, rubber components were a work in hand; the number of laggards was legion. My frequent, and indeed Sri Dash’s daily, tête-à-tête with the manufacturer of propulsion system in respect of the delay in delivery of transformers was highly astringic; correction: my conversation were more like a piqued  monologue but knowing the calm and composed Sri Dash, it would be in the fashion of a civil rebuke and not a caustic castigation. But in hind sight, I can safely describe the situation obtaining then with the help of the poet Hasrat Jaipuri, even if we did not relent on our venery-like chase for the famous transformers:

Kahin vo aa ke mita dein na intizar ka lutf

Kahin   qubool   na   ho jaaye   iltija  meri**

** Will the arrival of my lover kill the pleasure of waiting? My heart misgives me that my prayers for an early meeting may become fruitful.

The poet Riaz Khairabadi would perhaps have covered it well for all the slowpokes who were now breathing easy behind the known delays

Aisi  hi  intezar  mein  lazzat agar na ho

To do ghadi firaq mein apni basar na ho**

**If this expectant wait was not so full of flavour, how would I go through even two seconds of separation?

The tempo just could not be lost or what was looking like October then might easily extend to later and perilously close to the end of 2018! The charade had to be kept up, without it looking like make-believe, particularly with all the industry partners, who were in various stages of completion of delivery, installation, testing etc. For the next shop floor meeting, I thought I should use a written communication as all of them had by now got used to our verbal goading and admonitions; I wanted the urgency to sink in more dramatically. I simple presented them all with a simple note:

I cannot claim that it had a great effect but as the meeting progressed, I could see, from the corner of my eyes, many of the industry participants holding this piece of paper and presumably discussing it animatedly with others. My objective was met.

One of my friends, Dr. Rajiv Srivastava visited Chennai to be with us for a couple of days. Our association goes back a long time when we were together in RDSO but it had nothing to do with his being a doctor; it had everything to do with the congruity we developed in respect of finer things of life like theatre and acting, movies, poetry or just gassing purposelessly. He is like my family doctor too as he has the knowledge as well as the knack to satisfy you about the medication he prescribes, almost in the manner of a pedagogue; I have no idea whether he is a good physician but at the end of the day, even if his treatment helps me cease to live earlier than ordained, I would be kicking the bucket a convinced and happy man. Well, to cut a long story short, it was natural that I filled him with a lot about the train in the making. Now this doctor is also a bit of an engineer and a scientist; he devoured all the minutiae I bunged at him and asked me a question, “I can see that something great is in the making, all by ICF on its own. If this is so, and if this train is really the need of the hour, why was it not built earlier?” I was bemused by the starkness of this question for a moment but soon recovered to twinkle this unrehearsed reply, “Janab Doctor. We all know how to dispose of garbage and filth. We also know how to clean up accumulated rubbish, perhaps using a broom and a bucket. So tell me why our cities, say Chennai where you moved around today, or more so our hometown, Lucknow, are so full of garbage and dreck in public spaces?” A very sharp person that this gentleman is, he just nodded. Incidentally, I liked my reply so much that it has now become my favourite explanation whenever I am quizzed on, “Why only now, why not earlier?”

I have touched upon some design aspects earlier. But I omitted to talk about the heart, or rather the hearts, of our design effort. To my mind, the development of Train 18 design had, inter alia, two most crucial areas, the 3-phase propulsion system and the motorized bogie for 180/160 km/h operation.

Magical work has been done by an Indian company based in Hyderabad in the field of 3-phase propulsion system. This company has always believed in strong R&D work and has deployed a large group of very competent engineers for years to develop their products in the train propulsion and allied areas. Their products have proved to be more effective and reliable as compared to the systems offered by established multi-nationals in the country; the price of the propulsion system for locomotives and self-propelled vehicles has also come down over the years thanks to their presence. Fortunately, they had bagged the order for the propulsion system, including traction motors, and its complicated controls and that too through an open bidding process.

They had, time and again, delivered new products in a fraction of time period demanded by the competition. Mainly based on their credentials, we had categorized propulsion system and controls as one area where we were almost there. The system had to pack enough power under-board the train platform to achieve high levels of acceleration that we had specified. In addition, the responsibility of integrating many allied systems like the state of the art brakes, doors, air-conditioning etc. rested with them. They indeed proved to be equal to the task; all the deliverables, except of course the famous transformers, were in place and incessant interactions with our design team had ensured a largely trouble-free progress. We at ICF had gone out of the way to encourage and support them to help ourselves towards our goals, not only for Train 18 but so many other products, including the two little sisters of Train 18. I had seen the extraordinary merit in this company long back and had always egged them on to greater feats; many would tell you that I must have had some vested interest in doing so. Yes, indeed! My vested interest was to have an Indian company (or Indian companies) challenge themselves and bring to us world class product from their very own stable.

I had arrived at ICF with this reputation of being a ‘friend’ of this company but why should that have deterred me as far as my mind was clearly devoid of any venal or dishonest intentions? I derived strength from my belief that strong reasons must make strong actions, a simple cerebration propounded by the bard centuries ago;  Remember what Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV says, “O, the blood more stirs to rouse a lion than to start a hare!” I had seen the sleeping lion in this company in early 2000s when they were known merely as a manufacturer of electronic speed indicators. If fear of petty and shallow doubters and rumour- mongers prevented me from doing the right thing, it would be a shame. Thankfully, I never fell prey to the machinations and judgements of the frivolous, the feather-brained and the flippant. Today our country is much more the richer due to their continuous successes. You can actually keep a good thing down in government but fortunately, simply because of the fascinating journey of this company in the last fifteen years of so, there are many well-meaning enlightened railway officers who would swear by their stupendous capability. Suffice it to say that we had reposed great faith in this company and there we were, poised to shine in the reflected glory of their marvellous efforts in making of Train 18.

Development of motorized bogies was, however, another cup of tea. The bogie is the key to safety, ride behaviour and speed capability of a rolling stock. The term is used interchangeably by people for a railway coach; the bogie, however, is actually the carrier of the coach body, hardly noticeable by an average traveller. It is the heart of a rolling stock and its drive system, its guidance mechanism and its suspension arrangement; it is the truck with a framework/chassis that supports the vehicle body and since it carries the wheels, the traction and braking is transferred from the latter to the train through its structure, apparatus and components.

We at ICF and RDSO have acquired a certain expertise in redesign of existing bogies. All the new rolling stock designed by IR have had a bogie design reworked out of an existing design received from abroad, be it the WAP series of locomotives (which carry a tweaked version of flexi-coil bogies received from General Motors with WDM4 locomotives) or WAG/WDG series of high power freight locomotives (which carry redesigned version of the unidirectional-TM type high- bogies received on 6000 hp Hitachi locomotives) and so on. Nobody on IR had actually designed and serialized a bogie ab initio. Moreover, a coach bogie design to carry traction motors, an essential for Train 18, was simply not available. Some half-hearted attempts were made earlier to see if the LHB coach bogie could be modified to accept fully suspended traction motors but the approach itself was wrong as this bogie was not amenable to any such modification.

We had to design a new bogie from scratch. Let me reproduce the operative parts from our famous preliminary matrix for the train.

Fully suspended traction motor bogie fit for 180/160 km/h operation: Neither do we have a coach bogie design on IR to run at 180 km/h test speed nor do we have a bogie to accept fully suspended motors. Did we have capability to design one as, after all, we had designed rolling stock bogies in the past? Negative; what we had done so far was tinkering around a borrowed design. This was a different ball game; we had to design a bogie from scratch, de novo. At the same time, if any Design Wing on IR which can take this critical and massive work, it was ICF. We would do it but an established design consultancy firm must hold our hands. Once the design was done and validation run through simulations, manufacture of the frame and components would be given to competent companies. It would be possible to source most of the components in India, either through ICF’s bogie shop or through trade, with very limited imports. The bogie project concept is captured here:

The reader has read about all the exchanges with the consultants. The bogie concept and ordering of all parts/sub-parts that was developed and finalized jointly had gone through cconcept design, validation on basic data, detailed design and final validation through a long interactive process; dynamic analysis had finally showed stable behaviour even above 180 kmph speeds. The bogie concept, with fully-suspended motors, brake disc mounted on the wheel instead of the axle as in LHB bogies, compact brake callipers, air springs in secondary location, other suspension elements, various springs and dampers etc. are best shown in this model:

RDSO was involved in the said simulations and FEM works:

Development of the bogie frame and crucial parts like dampers, springs, bearings, metal-bonded rubber elements, air springs, various casting and forging items, that is nearly fifty individual parts, which was caried out mainly through the industry, was another elaborate set of activities; it needed regular deployment of ICF teams to the firms to involve first had in the development process. Manufacture of bogie frames was assigned to a firm in Kanpur, which has time and again done pioneering work in manufacture of indigenous version of imported bogies as well as tweaked design of existing fabricated bogies.

The Kanpur firm, whose contract called for supply of the bogie frames integrated with the cast and forged parts. We had asked them to source the cast and forged parts from firms we had also ordered on for our own manufacture of Train 18 bogies in future. These casting and forging firms, particularly the former were repeatedly defaulting on supply dates leading to the bogie supplier defaulting too. The bogie supplier, however, was always on our chase hit list and even I used to talk to him frequently to do something, work more than three shifts and whatever, but deliver, deliver, deliver...their MD, a man nearing seventy, is an exceptional mechanical mind who runs his company primarily on his own strength. Whether such concentrated expertise and control is good for business or not is not the issue; I merely want the readers to know the kind of person I was dealing with. He would always say, “Sir, the effort we have put for this project is our best. We have worked day and night to perfect the quality first and later the speed. ICF, and more than that you, are very important for us but please do not run with the hare and hunt with the hound. You tied our hands with this casting manufacturer and now please do not ask me to defend his delays as mine”. Well, to  a large extent he was right but I had to pursue him strongly as the principal supplier. 

Finally, things fell into place at least for the first two bogies and there it was, the first ever indigenous 180 km/h bogie, assembled and ready for testing:

I was earlier worried when we had learnt that the first bogie would be assembled in ICF only in by August end; it needed bogie frames, wheel and axle assembly, rubber parts, springs, dampers etc. to be with us for assembly. While other parts were either delivered or despatched already, absence of the bogie frames and rubber parts was critical. In my previous experience with new locomotives, I had always found that placing of car body on the bogie for the first time was a nightmare as some issue or the other, mostly some infringement, always cropped up. “When are you lowering your coach on bogies for the first time? That’s day you may encounter your worst fears”, I would tell Sri Srinivas and others on shop floor. They would all look at me as if I was from another planet, their silence saying, “Why would there be an issue? Everything would be fitted after pre-checks, after all”. I almost wanted some issue to crop up to tell off these cocksure guys! One day when I was at the shop floor, Sri Srinivas told me without any ceremony that the first coach had been lowered successfully and the entire process was absolutely uneventful. Really! I checked twice to confirm and rushed to see the coach and there it was, standing majestically on its own motorized bogies. Sri Srinivas and the team stood there smiling. I smiled too, muttered under my breath that they had got lucky and moved on. I did not show it then but later I told each member of the team how surprised and happy I was in being proved wrong. And indeed I was. Old fashioned, or rather outdated, that I was in the advancement of design tools, this was a big day for Train 18 in my limited understanding

I felt like calling our friend, the French lady of the transformer fame and repeating to her the exhorttions of the poet Sahar:

Ghata hai, bagh hai, mai hai, subu hia, jam hai saqi,

Ab  is  ke baad  jo  kuchh  hai  tera  kaam  hai  saqi**

** On this cloudy day in this garden, we have wine, we have goblets, we have the decanter. After all this all we need is the consummation from you.

(to be continued…)