The Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation (LMRC) is now all set to start the commissioning of the trial runs of its first Metro train set on December 1. Managing Director of Lucknow Metro Kumar Keshav handed over keys of the first Metro train to Yasar Shah, Cabinet Minister, Government of Uttar Pradesh.
Lucknow Metro’s Transport Nagar Depot is already well prepared to receive the first Metro train set for testing and starting the trial runs inside the depot on 1st December. The train set was inspected by Yasar Shah, Cabinet Minister, Cabinet Minister, Government of Uttar Pradesh in the presence of Alok Ranjan, Chief Advisor, Chief Minister, Rahul Bhatnagar, Chief Secretary and Sadakant, Principal Secretary, Department of Housing at Sri City, near Chennai – the manufacturing unit of M/s ALSTOM Transport India Ltd.
On the occasion, Kumar Keshav, Managing Director, said “I am extremely happy on this achievement and I thank the LMRC team for their dedicated and sincere efforts to make this happen. It was, nevertheless, an easy task to achieve the manufacturing of Rolling Stock (Metro Train) in such a stiff target. Yet, we all were determined to achieve this anyhow.”
For the last six months, Kumar Keshav, along with Mahendra Kumar, Director (Rolling Stock & Systems), LMRC, and other top officials have been visiting the manufacturing facility of M/s Alstom at their Sri City plant near Chennai to ensure that the manufacturing of Metro train is done as per the design and according to the pre-defined time schedule.
The Managing Director used to visit, inspect and review the manufacturing of the coaches on a regular basis at an interval of almost 20 days. He kept pressing the contractor for an early supply of the first Metro train. It is only because of his sustained efforts that Lucknow Metro’s Rolling Stock (Metro Train) is being dispatched within the contracted period of 65 weeks from the award of the contract which is one of shortest known period for supply of train world over.
The salient design safety features of the Metro trains are proven design, crashworthiness, adequate redundancy in the system, use of fire retardant material, fire smoke detection & protection, safe passenger evacuation in emergency and the anti-climbing features of buffers. The passenger safety features includes emergency communication facilities including talkback facility for passenger for talking to train driver directly, CCTV images inside trains to be displayed to Train Driver as well as the Centralised Security Control Room.
On 2nd September, 2015, Lucknow Metro had awarded the contract for supply, testing & commissioning of 80 cars for 20 trains of four car each along with train control & signaling system for Lucknow Metro Phase-1A project to French company, a consortium of ALSTOM Transport India Ltd, Bangalore & ALSTOM Transport SA, France at a cost of Rs 1069.81 crores.
