Practice Test 8

The Indian Railways is the largest railway network in Asia and one of the three largest in the world, carrying over two crore passengers and millions of tonnes of freight across a route network spanning more than sixty-seven thousand kilometres of track every single day. Since the establishment of the first railway line in India in April 1853, when a train drawn by three steam locomotives named Sahib, Sindh, and Sultan carried four hundred passengers from Bombay's Bori Bunder station to Thane in thirty-four minutes, the railway has served as the backbone of India's economic and social connectivity, linking distant regions, enabling trade, and facilitating the movement of millions of workers, students, and families. The organisation today employs over thirteen lakh persons directly across its eighteen operational zones and multiple production units, making it one of the largest employers anywhere in the world. The eighteen zonal railways, each headed by a General Manager, are further subdivided into divisions managed by Divisional Railway Managers who are responsible for day-to-day train operations, infrastructure maintenance, and passenger service standards within their jurisdiction. In recent years the Indian Railways has embarked on an ambitious and wide-ranging modernisation programme spanning rolling stock, track, signalling, stations, and electrification. The introduction of the Vande Bharat Express trainsets, designed and manufactured at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai entirely under the Make in India initiative, has elevated the standard of train travel significantly, with features including automatic sliding doors, onboard infotainment screens, GPS-based passenger information displays, controlled discharge toilets, and faster acceleration and braking enabled by the distributed traction motor design. The Dedicated Freight Corridor project, being developed along the western route from Dadri to Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai and the eastern route from Ludhiana to Dankuni near Kolkata, will separate freight trains from passenger trains for the first time on these critical corridors, allowing both categories to operate at higher speeds with greater punctuality and efficiency while dramatically increasing the freight capacity of these routes. Station redevelopment under the Amrit Bharat Station scheme aims to transform over a thousand railway stations into modern, aesthetically designed multimodal transport hubs with improved passenger amenities including clean waiting areas, upgraded sanitation facilities, digital information boards, retail and food and beverage outlets, and better connectivity to local bus, metro, and auto-rickshaw services. The Kavach automatic train protection system, developed indigenously by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation in collaboration with private industry, uses radio frequency identification tags, ultra-high-frequency radio communication, and satellite positioning to create a comprehensive collision avoidance network that automatically applies brakes when two trains approach each other on the same track within a defined safety distance, without requiring any intervention by the driver.