Indian Railways: Alstom Delivers 300th WAG12B Electric Locomotive At Nagpur Depot

Alstom India has delivered the 300th e-loco - WAG12B to the Indian Railways, and it is inducted by the Nagpur depot for freight duties.

Indian Railways has inducted a new WAG12B electric locomotive at its Nagpur Depot. Delivered by Alstom, it is the 300th unit to be delivered by Alstom. The locomotive is capable of hauling long-heavy freight trains at a top speed of 120 kmph. The 12,000 HP locomotive is delivered as a part of the 3.5 Billion Euro contract with Alstom, wherein the manufacturer will provide 800 high-powered double-section locomotives to Indian Railways. These locomotives are named at WAG-12B by the Indian Railways, and they can tug up to 6,000tonne rake at the top speed.

It is pertinent to note that as part of the contract, Alstom’s Nagpur Depot will be maintaining 250 WAG12B e-loco starting from series 60251. This depot is equipped with the latest technologies and features to anticipate breakdowns thereby enabling proactive maintenance of India`s most advanced freight locomotives at significantly lower costs.

The depot has 12 tracks for maintenance with hi-tech equipment. The depot is equipped with Centred Fleet monitoring (CFM) system to remotely monitor the fleet via the Health hub and Train Tracer system. The Prompt Response Team (PRT) is deployed for 24 x 7 loco attention. Green features like rainwater harvesting, zero discharge using effluent treatment plant and sewerage treatment plant, 100 per cent LED lights, daylight panels, occupancy sensors, greenery and provisioned for 1 MW rooftop solar plant.

This is the second such facility set up by Alstom, after the depot at Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, which houses the first 250 locomotives delivered to Indian Railways. It is also notable that Nagpur Depot completes 7 months+ of operations and records 1.6+ Million service defect-free kilometres for the Nagpur Fleet. The site is a success story for the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, where supervisors are from Alstom and technicians from Indian Railways.

The WAG-12B locos are being built at one of India`s largest integrated greenfield manufacturing facilities at Madhepura (Bihar), under a Joint Venture between Alstom and Indian Railways. This is the largest Foreign Direct Investment project in the Indian Railway sector. The facility has an installed production capacity of 120 locomotives per annum and Alstom has progressively achieved nearly 90 per cent indigenization.

With these powerful e-Locos being manufactured within the country, India has become the 6th in the world to join the club of countries producing high-horsepower locomotives indigenously.

The WAG-12B locomotives made its inaugural run on the first fully operational sections of the Dedicated Freight Corridors two years ago. Equipped with Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBT) based propulsion technology, these e-Locos will have considerable savings in energy consumption with the use of regenerative braking.

The technology is also helpful towards making the acceleration process more efficient by reducing heat generation and traction noise.Additionally, it will not only bring down operational costs, but also reduce the congestion faced by Indian Railways.