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Railway carriages now being rebuilt, not just repaired

EAM ASADUZZAMAN, Nilphamari
A vibrant team at Saidpur railway workshop is rebuilding railway carriages with the help of recycled scrap materials.
The team has gone out of their traditional way of just repairing and overhauling the carriages. The project would not only discourage Bangladesh Railway's (BR) long practice of import but also save huge amounts of foreign currency.
Since 2009, BR’s initiative of “Carriage Rehabilitation Project” is aiming to build 60 broad gauge railway carriages from scraps within 2013, Monzur Alam Chowdhury, divisional superintendent (DS) of Saidpur railway workshop said. A private firm has been involved to share the Tk 27.42 crore project. So far the team has already 'rehabilitated' 20 carriages from scraps retrieved from the junk carriages, dumped at the workshop.
Established in 1870, Saidpur railway workshop was one of the largest and best equipped workshops in the then undivided India. But alleged negligence towards the rail sector by successive governments has rendered it inefficient and useless. I lowever, this rehabilitation programme comes al a time when the
entire country realises the importance of improving the railway sector along side the road sector, officials observed.
“Under this project, 30 more rail carriages are being rehabilitated. Twenty carriages built earlier have already been pressed into service in the West Zone,” Chowdhury said.
During a recent visit to the workshop, this correspondent found workers and engineers working on four dilapidated carriages. The bodies of the carriages were broken and badly rusted. Workers were found busy cutting the old metal plates manually. They used simple locally made tools to dismantle the structures. The shed of the workshop did not have any electric fans and the heat generated inside the workshop could be clearly seen on the faces of the working men.
Mosharaf Hossain, sub assistant engineer at the carriage shop said that the rehabilitated carriages get almost the same economic life like those of the imported carriages.
This job of rebuilding the carriages is quite arduous for a team of 228 men in different sections of die workshop, he said.
“Here the workers are really sincere in doing the job but they are slowed down
for lack of necessary equipment,” said works manager Omar Faruk.
Zahirul Islam Zahir, a worker at the carriage shop, observed that for them the job is a big challenge. “We have to prove our potentiality by using manual labour and simple tools only. We want more facilities and would like to urge the government to continue this project for the benefit of the country,” Zahir said.
Moksedul Momin, president of Jatiyo Sramik League railway workshop unit in Saidpur, said that only Tk 34 lakh was spent for building each new carriage.
"If you go to import the same carriage, it would cost around Tk 3-4 crore each. Thus the project helped save crores,” Momin added.
The general manager (GM) of Western Zone of Bangladesh Railway, Ferdous Alam, told this correspondent that the government has undertaken such a project for the first time.
"It has been proven now diat modern and new carriages can also be built at a very cheap rate at Saidpur workshop,” hesaid.
“But we urgently need to upgrade the existing machines and recruit more skilled manpower for this workshop,” added Alam.