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ALLAHABAD: To commemorate 10 years of its existence, North Central Railway has planned a series of programmes. The year-long celebrations will have public participation and even passengers can take part in them. Talking to TOI, CPRO North Central Railway, Sandeep Mathur said, "It is a proud moment that NCR has completed 10 years. There will be a series of programmes that will be organised throughout the year so that people can have everlasting memories and celebrate their association with NCR. There will be logo designing, slogan and jingle writing and photography competitions which will be open for public participation." He also added that there will be various cultural and educational programmes during the month of September. Further, there will also be sporting activities for the railway employees and officers. In addition to this, there will also be a 'Walk' where general public will participate. North Central Railway came into existence on April 1, 2003. It has completed 10 years of existence this year. The railway zone is planning a series of events to commemorate the event. The first set of events will include a logo designing competition, slogan writing and photography competition. While logo designing, NCR is expecting the participants to design logo based on the achievements of North Central Railway.

There will also be a slogan writing contest in which participants will require to write a slogan about the various facets of North Central Railway. The maximum length of the slogan is about 10 words. There will also be a jingle writing contest which can be of maximum 8 lines. The last date of submission of entries to these contests is August 21. This competition is open to the general public and also to the railway employees.

To mark the event, there will also be a photography competition in which participants can showcase photographs pertaining to stations, trains or any event related with NCR. The last date of entries to this competition is October 15.

NCR officials informed that in September, a series of cultural and educational programmes are also being planned. In the cultural programme, there will be dance, drama and singing competition in which wards of the railway employees will showcase their talent in front of the audience. There will also be a debate competition.

In February next year, there will be various sporting activities for the railway employees and the officers. There will be various sports competitions including cricket, hockey, athletics and other events.

South Central Railway, Guntur, has temporarily augmented the following three special trains with additional sleeper class coaches to clear the extra rush/ wait listed passengers in train no .07101 Lingampalli-Kakinada town special train, train No.07102 Kakinada town-Lingampalli special train and train No.07202 Secunderabad-Kakinada town special train, according to a press release by senior divisional commercial manager C. Ramakrishna.

The Palakkad division of Southern Railway will soon introduce an effective waste management system to keep the Mangalore Central Railway station clean.A waste management unit, that will convert waste generated at the century-old station into biofuel, will be set up at the station and the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, (NITC) is currently working on the project. However, officials said that the project is still in the initial stage.The issue came up in a recent meeting chaired by Mangalore MP Nalin Kumar Kateel. At the meeting several passengers and people’s representatives had complained about lack of cleanliness at the station.Southern Railway additional divisional railway manager Mohan Menon told TOI that the division is contemplating on putting in place a permanent mechanism for waste management in all stations including Mangalore Central.“It is found that the tracks are littered with food packets, plastic bags and bottles and foils used for covering eatables. A few passengers also use the toilets on board the train while they are halted at stations. We have held discussion with NITC and soon will come out with a system to address the issue of lack of cleanliness,” he said.He added that the division has already reserved Rs 17 crore for various infrastructure developments in and around the Central railway station. “We are focusing on waste segregation at the user end. The waste management should start from passengers,” he said.

MADURAI: A stream of visitors thronged the KudalNagar station, near Madurai junction, on Thursday to explore a special train that is circling the country to promote awareness on science and biodiversity. Aptly named Science Express Biodiversity Special (SEBS), it reached Madurai after a four-day stay at Trichy junction.The 16-coach train showcases the rich biodiversity of the country with each coach displaying in detail the different biodiversity zones of the country. The train also displays other facets of biodiversity and its impact on livelihoods of the people in specific regions.The SEBS was inaugurated at Kudal Nagar station by V Ajithkumar, additional railway divisional manager, in the presence of railway officials. By afternoon students from more than ten schools visited the train, SEBS project staff said. "The response is very good and school students are the majority. We expect more people on the coming days as next three days are holidays," commented Divya Pande, a project staff. "Comparatively, the response in south India is overwhelming. For instance, we had 57,000 visitors in a single day at Vizakapatanam, while the average visitor count for four days at a north Indian station is around 50,000," she said.

"The exhibition train is very informative and the volunteers are explaining the concepts very well," said D Dhya neswaran, a class 6 student of Equitas Gurukul Matriculation School in Dindigul. Students from government schools were also present for the event. The eager students from government high school, Valayankulam were seen jotting the information they had gleaned from the exhibts. "Our teachers brought us to have a look and we are very thrilled," commented Roobarani, another school student.

The visitors, including students, had a tough time reaching the station as they had to negotiate the uneven road without proper metal tops. The access roads are poor and moreover the entry is confusing, said a school teacher from Valayankulam government school. The school vans have to navigate a dirt road nearby the Kudalpudur bridge to reach the station. It will be good if the railway authorities construct proper roads since many of the exhibition trains are stationed at Kudal Nagar regularly, the visitors said.

When contacted ADRM, V Ajithkumar said that the proposal to improve the roads is on anvil since the station was declared as Adarsh station recently. "We are working on the proposal and the station will be provided more facilities including roads in future," he said.

Bhubaneswar: The Carriage Repair Workshop of the East Coast Railway at Mancheswar added another feather to its cap by getting the coveted ISO 9001-2008 Certification for Quality Management Systems on Wednesday. RCoR Chief Mechanical Engineer Prem Chandra received the certificate issued by Certification Services Ltd. He praised the initiatives taken by the Mancheswar Workshop and urged its staff and officers to continue their efforts to achieve many such milestones in future also.Chief Workshop Manager SK Pankaj informed that the Workshop is planning to celebrate its completion of 30 years of production in December with lot of festivities and record outturn. It is also planning to get ISO 14000 for Environment Management System and ISO 18000 certification for Occupational Health & Safety System by December.Last month, the Workshop achieved the highest-ever outturn of 145 coaches. It also produced 1,001 wheels, which is another milestone.

Jewellery, pieces of ships, medieval ice skates, centuries-old skulls some incredible pieces of London’s history aren’t in museums, but underground.More often than not, they stay there, but work on a new railway line under the British capital is bringing centuries of that buried history to light.The 118-km £14.8-billion Crossrail line, due to open in 2018, will run across London from west to east, with a central 21-km section underground. That has meant tunnelling beneath some of the city’s oldest, most densely populated sections.In the city’s busy business core, archaeologists have struck pay dirt, uncovering everything from a chunk of Roman road to dozens of 2,000-year-old horseshoes, some golden 17th-century bling and the bones belonging to a few of the 20,000 people interred in a burial ground established in the 16th century.The 2,000-year history of London goes deep 5 to 6 meters deep, the distance between today’s street level and sidewalks in Roman times.Archaeologists have found everything from reindeer, bison and mammoth bones dating back 68,000 years to the remains of a moated Tudor manor house, medieval ice skates, an 800-year old piece of a ship and the foundations of an 18th-century shipyard.

Pieces of flint

Earlier this year, the dig unearthed skeletons belonging to victims of the Black Death, the plague that wiped out half of London’s population in 1348.

The latest discoveries include pieces of flint, some shaped into tiny blades, from a 9,000-year-old tool-making factory beside the Thames in what is now southeast London. It’s evidence the area was being resettled after the last Ice Age by nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Some of the archaeologists’ most delicate work involves remains from the Bedlam burial ground, established in the 16th century underneath what is now Liverpool Street as the city’s medieval church graveyards filled up.

Thousands of Londoners were buried there over 150 years, from paupers to religious nonconformists to patients at the adjacent Bedlam Hospital, the world’s first psychiatric asylum. Its name, a corruption of Bethlehem, became a synonym for chaos. — AP

Every day hordes of commuters have passed into the City of London unknowingly over the bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street, and which are now being exposed for the first time by the huge Crossrail construction project.The bodies include those of patients from Bethlem, the ancient mental health hospital from which the word “bedlam” entered the English language. Bodies that were never claimed by their families — often those of beaten, starved and exploited inmates — would have ended up in the burial ground alongside rich and poor, old and young, victims of plague and war, from across London.Jay Carver, lead archaeologist on the Crossrail sites — the largest archaeology project in the UK on the largest infrastructure project in Europe — described the site as exceptionally interesting. “Because of its history, we know that this is one of the most diverse burial grounds in London, a real cross section of its people across two centuries. Bone preservation is excellent in the finds we have already made, and we are expecting many important discoveries when we get into the main phase of the excavation.”The trial trenches have already yielded the first treasure from the 40 archaeology sites along the route of Crossrail’s tunnelling: a thumbnail-sized golden coin from Venice, pierced so it could be stitched on as decoration for some garment - and likely a bad loss when the thread broke and it fell into the gutter about 400 years ago.

The archaeologists have also found a stretch of a superbly engineered Roman road that probably led to a bridge across the Walbrook, one of London’s lost rivers. Builders laid logs and brushwood on the boggy ground before building it up in layers, finishing with gravel and rammed clay still so solid and sound that it looks modern. Embedded in the road surface was a human bone, possibly washed out of earlier burials nearby, and another loss that must have caused some cursing: a horse shoe. More Roman finds are confidently expected.

The walled, 0.8 hectare (two-acre) burial ground was opened in the mid-17th century by order of the mayor of London. It was the first built away from the city’s parish churches and their bursting, grossly overfilled graveyards and was usually known as Bedlam because it was on a land formerly occupied by the mental health hospital, which had recently moved to Moorfields. It would move again to the present site of the Imperial War Museum, and finally to Bromley, Kent, where it survives today as the Bethlem Royal hospital.

From the start, because it had a preaching pulpit but no church, it was associated with dissenters - as Bunhill Fields later became. Mr. Carver hopes to find evidence of two particularly interesting characters known to have been buried there: “Freeborn John” - John Lilburne - a radical campaigner and pamphleteer for the rights of the common man who greatly influenced the Levellers, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, exiled twice and eventually died while on parole from his final jail term.

John Lockyer, a soldier in Cromwell’s New Model Army who was executed for his involvement in the Bishopsgate mutiny - when the army defied orders to leave London - was also buried there after a funeral that terrified the authorities because it was attended by thousands wearing the Levellers’ green ribbons.

The victims of several outbreaks of plague were also buried there; as it filled, there were appeals for more top soil to keep the bodies decently covered, and by the time it closed in 1714 it held a 2-metre deep layer of corpses. Because the bodies came from all over London, those buried there are unusually diverse socially. This poses a problem for Mr. Carver; there are no surviving burial records for the cemetery, and instead names are scattered through thousands of records in the parishes where they lived or died. He hopes to ask the public for help in tracking them down.

Part of the cemetery was excavated in the 1980s by the Museum of London, when the Broadgate Centre was built. But while office blocks gradually replaced the Victorian townhouses, factories and warehouses, which in turn displaced the warren of Georgian buildings, an extensive stretch of the burial ground survived under Bishopsgate. The busy road by Liverpool Street station following the route taken by the Romans almost 2,000 years earlier kept the site as open ground and preserved the remains from being destroyed by pile driving and foundations.

The remains of several hundred individuals have already been found in the trial pits and the trenches dug to relocate utilities. Mr. Carver believes he will find up to 4,000 more when the main excavation starts next year. © Guardian News & Media 2013

LUDHIANA: The Union minister for information and broadcasting ManishTewari has written to the Railway minister MalikarjunKharge seeking his personal intervention about the completion of the foot-bridge at the Ludhiana railway station.In his letter Tewari wrote to Kharge that the work had been started on the foot-bridge at his initiative a few years ago. However, midway the railways stopped the work for unexplained reasons.Seeking enquiry into the abandoning of work on the foot-bridge, he said, "the matter may kindly be got enquired as why the foot over bride had to be abandoned and how much money was spent on it before being abandoned". He asked as why was the project cancelled and whether any penalty has been fixed and what action had been taken in this regard.Emphasizing the need for early completion of the foot-bridge, Tewari pointed out, "Ludhiana is one of the important cities in Punjab with a lot of railway traffic". The new foot-bridge is urgently needed as the existing one is quite narrow, he added.

The work of the foot over-bridge has been hanging fire for a past long time and this bridge could provide a lot of relief to the residents who have to manage through the narrow bridge that exists presently.

LUDHIANA: The Union minister for information and broadcasting ManishTewari has written to the Railway minister MalikarjunKharge seeking his personal intervention about the completion of the foot-bridge at the Ludhiana railway station.In his letter Tewari wrote to Kharge that the work had been started on the foot-bridge at his initiative a few years ago. However, midway the railways stopped the work for unexplained reasons.Seeking enquiry into the abandoning of work on the foot-bridge, he said, "the matter may kindly be got enquired as why the foot over bride had to be abandoned and how much money was spent on it before being abandoned". He asked as why was the project cancelled and whether any penalty has been fixed and what action had been taken in this regard.Emphasizing the need for early completion of the foot-bridge, Tewari pointed out, "Ludhiana is one of the important cities in Punjab with a lot of railway traffic". The new foot-bridge is urgently needed as the existing one is quite narrow, he added.

The work of the foot over-bridge has been hanging fire for a past long time and this bridge could provide a lot of relief to the residents who have to manage through the narrow bridge that exists presently.

The Kerala Railway Police (KRP) and the Railway Protection Force (RPF) will prepare an action plan to ensure the safety of women passengers on trains and create legal awareness to curb such cases.

A field report comprising suggestions and recommendations of women’s organisation leaders will be submitted to top Railway Police officials within a couple of weeks. District-level opinion-gathering meetings will be arranged for the purpose and the recommendations will be sent to the Chief of Kerala Railway Police in Thiruvananthapuram.

“We have received directives from senior officers to prepare the report at the earliest. We will forward it within a week,” said KRP Sub-Inspector P. Muraleedharan. He said the new action plan would focus more on creating awareness among women passengers of how to act legally to curb crimes, including misbehaviour and sexual harassment by fellow passengers or officials on trains.

Leaflets distributed

KRP and RPF officials jointly distributed over 400 leaflets on Monday to sensitise women on legal ways to combat sexual harassment and various other atrocities reported during train journeys. City Police Commissioner G. Sparjan Kumar inaugurated the distribution campaign at the Kozhikode railway station.