Engines with Toilet ?

Train engines will now come with toilets

TNN | Feb 14, 2013,

DALTONGANJ: Few people with some interest in the Indian Railways know that the engine cabin of any train, passenger or express, is devoid of a toilet and washbasin. An even lesser number of people are aware of how the crew members manage to relieve themselves.

Santosh Kumar Tiwari, a railway official atDaltonganj railway station, said, "This is very embarrassing for the crew. It is another matter that the engine crew is constituted by only male members, hence they do not bother about what the other is doing."

It took years for the All India Railways Federation to press the railway board to provide this facility but all those efforts seemed futile until Pawan Bansal took over as the present railway minister. He realized that this demand was justified and essential.

Now that the minister has taken cognizance of the situation, this sorry state may well be a thing of the past with engine cabins having both toilets and washbasins.

Tiwari said the Charbagh Railway Workshop in Lucknow has devised, developed and initiated rotter fittings of the toilet and washbasin in train engine cabins, much to the relief of the train engine crew members. The country has more than 9,000 locomotives and these will soon have this facility, hoped Tiwari.

The absence of a loo, especially in long-distance trains like Rajdhani, where the cabin door is not to be opened at all, makes it very difficult for the crew members in case of an emergency.

This apart, the engine crew members face problems when passengers try to usurp a space in the engine cabin for one or two stations, during longer journeys. The sight of passengers blocking the corridor of engines of a train is a common sight in Indian Railways. This is not only potentially hazardous for the passengers, who could be simply flung out of the train if it is speeding and the doors are ajar, but also the train. There have been occasions when the engine crew members have been assaulted by passengers in the Coal India Chord section (CIC), Dhanbad and Mughalsarai railway division, etc because they have rejected the pleas of passengers for space in the engine cabin or its corridor.