Title - Sultry ride ahead as WR turns blowers off

Commuters on Western Railway should expect a hotter and sweltering commute to office and back home as the railways have reportedly disconnected air-cooling blowers meant for passengers in over 46 local trains. In fact, the authorities are in the process of removing more of them to avoid water seepage and damage thereof during the rainy season.

The new AC-DC Siemens trains have air-blowers, which pump in 14,535 cubic metres of fresh air per hour inside each coach. The state-of-the-art ventilation system was installed at a cost of Rs4lakh per coach, taking the cost to Rs48 lakh per 12-car train.

“Water falling on a running train gets accumulated at its edges, leading to malfunctioning and water seepage in the blowers, hence the precaution of disconnecting them,” said an official at the Mumbai Central Workshop.

While Subhash Gupta, member of the National Railway Users Consultative Committee, said, “blowers have always led to more problems than solutions’’, WR chief spokesperson Sharat Chandrayan denied they had been blowers had been disconnected.

“The system is such that technicians have to switch the mode off. It is not that all blowers have been completely disconnected,’’ he told DNA.