Railways on track to meet FY 23 production target for coaches, locomotives, wheels

Five months into the new financial year, the Indian Railways is on track to achieve production targets for coaches, wheels, locomotives, for the year 2022-23, despite supply constraints, a senior Railways official said on Tuesday.

“All Indian Railways Production Units are supplying to meet the ever-increasing requirement of Rolling Stock for Indian Railways and are on fast track to achieve their production targets in 2022-23, despite some supply chain constraints,” the official said.

As per the data shared by the official, for 2022-23, against a set target of 5,896 LHB or Linke Hofmann Busch coaches, the Railways has achieved production of 1,887 such coaches in the first five months [April-August] of the current year. The production of LHB coaches stood at 6,291 units in 2021-22, a 45% year-on-year increase over production of 4,323 coaches in 2020-21.

Similarly, for production of locomotives, the target for current financial year is 1,190 locos, of which 371 locos have been produced till August. In the previous year, the Railways factories had produced 969 locos as against 721 locos in 2020-21, up by about 34%.

“Rail Wheel Plant Belapur and Rail Wheel Factory Yelahanka are the wheels and wheelsets producing units. The two have collectively produced 92,118 wheels in this financial year so far, which is 6.5 times the wheels produced last year during the same period. Similarly, production of rail axles have also increased by 7% during the same period,” the official added.

Key Railways Production Units include Integral Coach Factory (ICF) at Chennai, Rail Coach Factory (RCF) at Kapurthala, Modern Coach Factory (MCF) at Rae Bareli, Chittaranjan Locomotive Works (CLW) at Chittaranjan, Banaras Locomotive Works (BLW) at Varanasi, Patiala Locomotive Works (PLW) at Patiala, Rail Wheel Factory (RWF) at Bengaluru and Rail Wheel Plant at Bela.