Jaipur, March 12 The anti-collision 'Kavach' system has been sanctioned for 5,561 km of railway track under the North Western Railway at an estimated cost of about Rs 2,300 crore, an official said on Thursday.
Work is currently underway on around 1,556 km of track, they said.
The chief public relations officer of North Western Railway said that the work to install the indigenous Kavach 4.0 system has been approved across all divisions of the zone.
He said tenders have been issued for laying optical fibre cable along 1,586 rail km of track, and about 56 per cent of the work has been completed.
Tenders have also been issued for station-based Kavach installations, while survey and drawing work is currently underway.
Under the project, a total of 250 telecom towers will be installed to support the system, of which work on 221 towers is presently in progress, the CPRO said.
He said Kavach is a complex and integrated safety system involving several sub-systems, including RFID tags placed along the track at intervals of about one kilometre and near signals to provide precise train location data.
The system also includes telecom towers equipped with optical fibre connectivity and power supply to enable continuous communication between locomotives and station control units.
Locomotive-based Kavach units communicate with track-mounted RFID tags and transmit information to telecom towers while receiving radio instructions from station-based systems.
The system is integrated with the locomotive's braking mechanism to apply brakes automatically during any emergency.