Vaccum Cleaner on Track

For decades, an army of rag-pickers would march up and down the city’s railway tracks gathering empty plastic bottles, wrappers and other garbage that had been thoughtlessly discarded by commuters. But now, Central Railway (CR) has its very own vacuum cleaner. For the first time in India, an engine has been modified into a massive trash can, which is able to pull in all the garbage as it chugs along the tracks.
An old engine that was to be relegated to the scrap yard got a new lease on life when CR general manager Kul Bhushan came up with the idea of morphing it into a garbage disposal system on wheels. CR engineers worked on the engine at the Parel workshop and last week it was quietly put to work.

Vinit Kumar, deputy general manager, Central Railway said, “We have modified one of our old engines in such a way that it will work as a vacuum cleaner.”

For over a week now, CR officials have been operating this cleaner-on-wheels every night on some of the dirtiest stretches on the central line—between Kurla and Wadala stations, and CST and Masjid station.

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