Just about four days after the Monorail services were disrupted, on Thursday evening, the transport facility was affected again for over three hours, forcing the authorities to cancel over 20 services.
What had gone wrong?
Around 4.30pm on Thursday, Rolling Stock Train 4 (RST 4) was on its way to Chembur. When it was about to reach Mysore Colony monorail station, the air pressure of the braking system dropped. Due to inadequate air pressure, the brake system malfunctioned and remained unreliable for further operations. On Thursday morning, too, RST 4 had faced braking issues.
Where did passengers go?
Behind RST 4 was RST 7, which started from Wadala Car Depot station with passengers on board. But they were asked to disembark at the very next station — Bhakti Park station. From there onwards, RST 7 went ahead cautiously towards Chembur. It was plying at half its usual speed -- 15 kmph -- instead of 32-35 kmph. This decision was taken by Scomi Engineering, the operating and maintenance firm (which also manufactured monorail trains), to couple both the trains and get the affected train inside the car depot to fix the problem.
When did services resume?
The train was moved away from the guideway beam only around 7:30 pm. Meanwhile, the revenue services of monorail got crippled with several trips getting cancelled as various mitigation measures were taken to resolve the problem at Mysore Colony station itself. The services were brought back to normalcy after 7.30pm.
What's MMRDA saying?
A Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) official said that operations below 97% schedule is penalised. If that's what happened on Thursday, action will be taken against the agency, he said. In the past fortnight, there were two incidents. On November 30, part of the guideway wheel of RST 5 fell on the road, which has not yet been found. On the evening of December 7, RST 8's electronic system had crashed or hung, thereby making it immobile. Revenue services on December 7 had to be suspended for the rest of the day.
