Sunday musings on ICF and Train 18

Have we been talking about transformation at ICF and the active human transformers, almost ad nauseum? Ironically, by June-end we knew that another type of Transformers were going to transform our delivery schedule negatively. Transformers form a part of the propulsion system of the train, with one each employed in one basic unit, i.e., four in total. A Transformer converts the overhead electric supply to from a very high voltage to a lower level. It was a new design. The model worked out by the manufacturer of propulsion and allied systems was to get the first five Transformers from a major manufacturer in France and get them to manufacture the rest in latter’s factory in Baddi in India for the second rake onwards. One of the five Transformers was going to be tested thoroughly first in the manufacturers’ premises, then in test centres in India and finally for a system test at the premises of propulsion equipment at Hyderabad.

I remember meeting the French team twice after the delay looked like calamitous. Long discussions about their need to go carefully, this being a new design, and concern about delays led to childlike bargaining. But the lady manager heading their team was unmoved. In our last meeting in July, the best she offered was delivery, one by one, by beginning of September, cutting down the schedule by all of two days. Where else would this Persian saying fit better? “Zameen jumbad, na jumbad Gul Mohammad”, meaning the whole world may shake but Gul Mohammad does not move an inch. Be that as it may, we had no option but to respect their professional cussedness and rework the famous perennially changing PERT charts I had talked about in some jest earlier.

I had the key team members Dash, calm, and almost saintly, Manish, capable, efficient and eager and the new masterly PCME Shubhranshu to fall back on. Dash worked out some possible manipulations in the test schedules at the manufacturers’, test centres and installation at ICF quickly. He proposed taking the risk of testing and installation on two different transformers parallel and even with this transformed schedule, the train could still be turned out only by September end. Shubhranshu asked the manufacturer to airlift the transformers from France and he agreed to do so at his own cost. By the way, airlifting was something we had already forced many manufacturers to agree to, many times beyond the scope of the contract. Reworking the PERT charts was fine but the danger was that once everyone, including other vendors, knew about the imminent delay, things would slip at every front. Fortunately, some major manufacturers, like the suppliers of brake system, wheel assembly and bogie frames etc, were too far gone to slip too much; some critical supplies had already been received and many others were under final touches or bench testing.

It was my job at this stage not to fret and fume but to keep the stakeholders energized, particularly our design and manufacturing teams, including the teams of the industry partners. Having christened the train as Train 18, there was no scope of a slide back beyond 2018. I am not very cool and calm, like a level 5 emotionally-intelligent leader must be, but this was the time to force myself to deal with the delicacy of the situation with composure, not panic. 

Let me give an example. A firm in Chennai, a manufacturer of the interior panels and toilets, perhaps the best in India in terms of capability and quality, was chosen by Srinivas, for Train 18 interior works; remember that the key team, headed by the duo of Chief Design Engineers had a kind of carte blanche to decide the list of such vendors and the mode of calling bids. Being a supplier to Metro coach factories, this firm was not used to the speed and volumes we expected from them. They were struggling and all kinds of measures were being thought off by the team to keep them as close to the schedule as possible. There was an exasperated view that the firm had bitten more than they could chew. In spite of the design team opposing it, I placed an order on another firm as a desperate measure, a fall back option. But we made it clear this Chennai firm that they were our first choice and we would like all but one coach to be done entirely by them, reserving only a single coach for the second order. They were pursued so vigorously and relentlessly by so many officers that occasionally their managers would disappear from the factory, the phone network and perhaps the world; I thought it was all in the game. They would not take even my phone calls but that they were making the effort of their life was clear. There were some who would say that we made a mistake in placing all our eggs in their basket but this was not the time for “I told you so”; we were married to them and we had to remain married. I had always said that excusing of a fault was worse than the fault itself; here I don’t think it was a fault at all. Srinivas was authorized and he took the decision; it was now a decision of the team which we had to own and back all through. We had reposed confidence in the best company for train interiors of trains in India and we needed to support them to help ourselves. 

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. My frequent, and indeed Dash’s daily, tête-à-tête with the manufacturer of propulsion system in respect of the delay in delivery of transformers was highly astringent; correction: my conversation were more like a piqued  monologue but knowing the calm and composed 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 intezar 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.)

As for the slowpokes who were now breathing easy behind the known delays, I would smile at them with the poet Riaz Khairabadi:

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: 

One of my notes to heads of partner companies before a shop floor meeting

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.

A close friend of mine, Dr. Rajiv Srivastava, visited Chennai to be with us for a couple of days. 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?”

Meanwhile, I had kept my soft initiatives on. There was nothing more than a clear leadership role; no technical discussions, no drawing, no specifications, just remove all impediments and keep the morale high. My job was only to keep meeting the core team, mostly with industry representatives in attendance as well, and keep their morale high. The message I always tried to communicate, in my own way, was a sort of repetition of what all I had been saying since the beginning:

·   You are the best team I could hope for, quoting Maxwell, “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.” I perhaps had a vision but without this team I would have come a cropper.

·   You are not merely laying bricks in a wall, you are building a grand cathedral. You will make mistakes but treat them as opportunities to do it better. “It is wise to direct your anger towards problems, not people, and  to focus your energies on answers, not excuses.” (William Arthur Ward) There would be no blame games, only singularity of purpose for all of you.

·   There is no shame in failures. There is a whole lot of shame in not attempting.

·  We  may not be the best brains in the business of train-making but we are Indians and Indians can work hard. You have to burn the midnight oil both in design and manufacturing interactions with industry partners; if Train 18 becomes Train 19, all of us will sink in oblivion.

·    Treat your vendors from industry as partners, I was very keen that a change in our outlook, and in our disposition, that our vendors were our companions in this enterprise of great significance had to be inculcated at every level in ICF. Every single manufacturer, big or small had to feel a part of a great endeavour, a part of history. I found to my happy surprise that the key members of the team were already ahead of my thoughts, notably both the Chief Design Engineers.

I do not remember the exact lines but I am trying to catch the essence here: move ahead fearlessly, you do not have a speed breaker in your leader but a facilitator:

Na  aala afsar na hi speed  breaker hain,

Ye qismat hamari  tumhare rahbar hain

(Your leader is not an exalted officer or a speed breaker, move ahead for he is lucky to be your leader)

And this was indeed the time for us to demonstrate our sense of purpose to all stakeholders. During a big review meeting, all the participating CEOs were taken for a bit of surprise, trying to explain their development and delivery schedules in the middle of all the hammer and tong sounds of a the Shell shop. It was war now and we would have our war room meetings on the shop floor right next to the unfinished shells. As expected, there was some skepticism but we had our first shop floor meeting with all the stakeholders in attendance, including some from abroad. I cannot say how much it helped but everyone agreed that the meeting succeeded in conveying the significance as well as the urgency for the novel project. “Never attended a meeting like this. You guys mean business, I can see that”, said one of the participants from abroad.

Meeting with top executives of ICF and industry on the shop floor

Yes, sir, we did mean business. The poet Ali Sardar Jafri covered it well:

Naya chashma hai patthar ke shigafon se ubalne ko,

Zamana  kis  qadar  betaab  hai   karvat  badalne  ko

(A new stream is bursting forth to boil from the stones, the world here is passionately agitated to turn a new leaf.)

As I write, I am faced with a dilemma a novice chronicler would perhaps always face. What to write and what to ignore or eliminate? I am not intending to let this story be followed only by those who understand design and manufacture of railway coaches, or rather not merely that but engineering processes as such. So going too much into niceties of design and manufacturing would be too esoteric. I have, therefore, been trying to bring in design and manufacturing issues and solutions only in dribs and drab and that too in a rather cursory, not elaborate, manner. I am trying to build this narrative around a mosaic of all issues usually encountered while executing a project of this magnitude. Handling of HR is always the key and that has taken precedence over knotty technical aspects in my story such that neither are diehard rail fans disappointed nor are those with wide interest in things Indian find it stodgy.

To make sure that the entire floor space of the train would be available for use of passengers with a wide gangway, all equipment had to be mounted underneath the floor, i.e., mounted below the under frame members. This had never been attempted earlier in a coach in India. The complexity of the design and subsequent manufacture can be depicted through a simple model of one of the under frames, which had a multiplicity of gobs of equipment packed in it; and imagine, there were eight such types in the train of sixteen coaches! 

Model of the equipment mounted under the board on the chassis

As I have written earlier, the ordering was done very quickly and smoothly; that was, however, half the story. Having ordered, convincing the selected suppliers, who frequently depend on some other agencies for sourcing components, to deliver the outline envelope drawing and then the equipment took some effort on the part of the design team members.

We had gone for the best or near best suppliers with proven credentials. We had ordered for two rakes only; components like high speed Pantograph, roof-mounted 25KV cable and isolator systems, solid state devices etc. were required in small numbers/quantities. Many a time any extent of assurances or incentives to these suppliers did not work in our favour to get the material on time. There was also the issue of dealing with competing suppliers within the team and this had its own disadvantages as dynamics amongst them, at times, time becomes unpredictable, governed by some extraneous factors; I know it may sound frivolous but I left all this as the sole preserve of the cool and composed, Mr. Tranquillity Dash. And I was told he handled it smoothly, frequent pin pricks et al. All I know is that he was able to create a synergy amongst all such vendors and sub-vendors to minimize the tussles at various stages of manufacture. At the end of the day, the takeaway here once again is that it is all about positive human interaction; it matters the most and works most of the time.

After the shop floor meetings, all the participants were invited for dinner at my bungalow. One ticklish issue was solved during dinner after the main representative of one of the competing firms forced me to sing Jim Morrison of the Doors with him. The participants had to suffer some fervid but pathetic singing and I am sure Morrison was turning in his grave. And soon Dilip would do his monstrous pirouetting and shaking and all the left over problems of the day would vanish in thin air.

Srinivas was struggling with some issues with the toilet as soon as the first coach was provided with one. The toilet was meant to be a unique combination of vacuum evacuation with bio-tank. Someday India would see the prevalent system of vacuum evacuation from toilets to collection tanks which are further evacuated at maintenance depots but many roadblocks, some real and some perceived, have kept this system out of our trains. Be that as it may, the toilets were designed to look and function, conceptually, as under:

The toilet model

The problem being battled by him was - the size of the wash basin and location of the touch-free tap. While the manufacturer insisted that what he had developed and supplied conformed to European standards and also as specified by ICF. An army of ICF team members had a different opinion. Most of them had used the wash basin in the prototype toilet and found all sorts of difficulties, like the size being adequate for a proper Indian style kulla (mouth rinse) as well as a South Indian hand wash, angle of bend for an average Indian, alignment with the mirror and so on. I was requested to check myself which I did immediately and after some mock kullas and hand washes, decided that the design had to be reworked. The manufacturer protested but soon agreed to Indianize the design. New moulds for FRP items and their manufacture and heavy rework by ICF were involved; this set us back by some 10 days but then, there were other things setting us back as well.

I was always quizzed by the media about the facilities that we were going to provide for the differently-abled passengers. What we do have on trains today is an apology; doing and undoing a job by installing something for namesake without proper space for movement of wheel chair and a purposefully designed toilet. Talk to some of differently-abled passengers and they would tell you that more than giving them sops, what we need to do is proper infrastructure for them like ramps or mechanized way of getting them onto buses and trains and special facilities inside the transport. I knew that Srinivas was serious about improving things on this front. The models that he kept showing me off and an on looked positively better. One of these days, I checked one of the completed coaches meant for differently-abled passengers- good sense of space for manoeuvring a wheel chair and comfortable toilets. He did not leave it at that; he engaged some differently-abled volunteers to actually use the train facilities and they gave it an unbiased thumbs up.

Spacious section for the differently-abled, for the first time on IR

The facility did not include provision of a lift for a wheel chair for hoisting it from or lowering it to the platform. We had developed this product and tried it out in a regular LHB coach but held it back as a satisfactory arrangement for safe operation of the lift was not ready. Things should have been easier on Train 18 as the train had no risk of starting without the lift getting homed in its nest as the plug door would not allow it. Various time and development constraints prevented us from executing the best solution but we decided that this aspect must be addressed better from the third rake onwards.

All the Train 18 shells were ready in the nominated bay, undergoing furnishing and installation of equipment. The sequence of manufacture of shells from the start on the under frame jig to lowering of the car body on bogies had been proven and most of the shells were already on bogies by September 18. The sequence, an archetypal of working in ICF, although carried out by Shashi Bhushan, Ravichandran and their team certainly more methodically, has been captured pictorially here:

Shell production sequence

There were some modifications on in the driver’s cab layout till the very end. The cab is a place where practically every major supplier of sub-system had, so to say, an axe to grind with the manufacturer of the cab interiors and the driver’s console desk being the major domos. The bickering among all these went on and CDEs Srinivas and Dash, were there to appease them. 

The first driver’s cab as assembled at ICF 

A mere look at this cab model gives me goose pimples. This is the place which would witness new vistas being created for IR. Here is the glass through which a new future would unfold. Yonder is the locus which would bear the testimony of a dream turning into reality. There sits the throne on which a Train Pilot would sit and create history, but before that, would uneasy lie the head that wore a crown? Or as the Shakespeare’s King Henry IV said, “O God, that one might read the book of fate and see the revolution of the times.”

No, sir. Let fate vamoose, go far and stay there! I and my team are going to follow Bashir Badr:

Jis  din  se chala hoon meri  manzil pe nazar hai

Aankhon ne kabhi  meel ka patthar nahin dekha

(I have only the destination in my view since the day I started walking, my eyes do not look at any milestone on the way.)

Were we worried? No and not without reason although someone would soon show me the mirror, perhaps through the poet Dagh:

Aap ka aitbar  kaun  kare,

Roz ka intezar kaun kare

(Who is now willing to believe you, who would keep waiting for you?)

    (To be continued...)