A JUMBO EFFORT

An ingenious technical modification to existing infrastructure helps the Indian Railways cut down elephant deaths due to train collisions

- AVISHEK G. DASTIDAR

No man or beast can ever dare to come in the way of an elephant herd when it goes foraging along its chosen route, or corridor, of migration. Except the mechanical beast called the locomotive, which, bound by fixed tracks, cannot play by those rules. In India's Northeast, home to more than 10,000 elephants, this often leads to an inevitable, and tragic, conclusion. Over 200 elephants have died after getting hit by trains in the northeastern states in the past 10 years. It is a crying shame, and something that needed an urgent fix. The Indian Railways finally found one, as engineers of the Assam-based Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) blended existing technology with a twist of jugaad to set off alarms in train engines and at stations every time a herd of elephants was found approaching railway tracks. It has come to be called IDS or the Intrusion Detection System.

It was in late 2021 that the Railways chanced upon a solution lying in plain sight: optic fibre cables (OFC) laid along tracks to transmit signals. They only had to incorporate some Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology to transform those very OFCs into intelligent sensors capable of detecting acoustic vibrations along their entire length. All one had to do was send a laser pulse and analyse the scattered light patterns resulting from the vibrations and disturbances in the cable.