Alstom Delivers Higher Speed 300th WAG12B e-Locomotive to the Indian Railways

A joint venture between Alstom and Indian Railways produces the WAG-12B locos at Madhepura, Bihar, an important greenfield manufacturing site.

Written by: Arjita Gupta

Edited by: Krutarth Ghosalkar

Last Updated: March 30, 2023

Alstom, a French multinational builder of rolling stock, announced on Wednesday that it had delivered 300 electric locomotives to the Indian Railways, enhancing that nation's ability to haul at higher speeds the heavy freight trains. Alstom is providing 800 powerful double-section locomotives with a combined 12,000 HP (9MW) as part of a 3.5-billion-euro contract for freight service. These locomotives, known by the Indian Railways as WAG-12B, have a top speed of 120 km/h and can pull rakes weighing 6,000 tonnes.

The 300th electric locomotive (e-loco) was flagged off from Alstom's cutting-edge locomotive repair facility in Nagpur, which was opened by the Hon. PM Shri Narendra Modi in December of last year, to commemorate the milestone delivery. In addition to other important dignitaries from Indian Railways, Naresh Lalwani, General Manager of Central Railway, attended the celebration of this milestone. As part of the agreement, 250 WAG12B e-locos starting with series 60251 would be maintained by Alstom's Nagpur Depot.

The most modern features and technology are present at this depot, which enables proactive maintenance of India's most sophisticated freight locomotives at drastically reduced prices. The depot's 12 tracks for maintenance of high-technology machinery.

The depot has a Centered Fleet Monitoring (CFM) system that allows monitoring of the remote fleet through the Train Tracer and Health Hub systems. There is a Prompt Response Team (PRT) on call around the clock for loco support. Nagpur Depot records 1.6+ Million service defect-free kilometres for the Nagpur Fleet after operating for more than 7 months. The facility is a success story for PPP (the Public Private Partnership) concept, and professionals from Indian Railways and Alstom are in charge of supervision.

Green features include rainwater collection, effluent, and sewerage treatment plants with sewerage treatment plants that have zero discharge, 100% LED lighting, occupancy sensors, daylight panels, landscaping, and space for a 1 MW rooftop solar plant. After the depot in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, which has 250 locomotives firstly delivered to Indian Railways. And now this is the second such facility established by Alstom.

Under a joint venture between the Indian Railways and Alstom, the WAG-12B locos are being produced at Madhepura (Bihar), one of India's largest integrated sites for greenfield manufacturing. The Indian Railway sector's greatest project involving foreign direct investment is this one. The factory's installed manufacturing capacity is 120 locomotives per year, and Alstom has gradually increased its level of domestic production to over 90%.

India is now the sixth nation in the world to produce high-horsepower locomotives domestically thanks to the production of these potent e-Locos there. Two years ago, the first fully operating sections of the Dedicated Freight Corridors were traversed by the WAG-12B locomotives. The main goods transported by these e-Locos across 2 Union Territories and 17 States are food grains, cement, minerals, coal, petrochemical products, posts/parcels, and fertilizers.

These e-Locos utilize IGBT-based propulsion technology. The tech is anticipated to reduce energy consumption through the use of regenerative braking. By lowering heat generation and traction noise, the technique also aids in improving the efficiency of the acceleration process. It will also reduce the Indian Railways' congestion problems and lower the operation cost.