RAILWAY: BETTER THAN HOME HYGIENIC LINEN FOR PASSENGERS ONBOARD IN TRAIN COACHES

TTT NEWS NETWORK

KOLKATA, 30 NOVEMBER 2024 :

A press meet has been organised today by Public Relations Department of Eastern Railway to explain how the Railways are making all-round effort to provide good quality linen and blankets to the passengers on-board for a comfortable journey experience.

Indian Railways make every endeavour to provide clean, hygienic, well ironed, good quality linen/bedroll to all passengers travelling in Air-conditioned Sleeper coaches (3 AC, 2 AC, 1st AC) by using latest state-of-the-art technology for good passenger experience. Linen provided to the passengers during train journey are washed in mechanized laundries/washing facilities after every single use. Some of the measures taken by Indian Railways to ensure passenger comfort and safety by providing clean bedrolls are enumerated below :

• Procurement of new linen sets is carried out with improved specifications that have higher tolerances to ensure better quality.
• Mechanized laundries have been set up to ensure supply of clean and hygienic linen sets.
• Standard machines and reputed specified chemicals are used for washing of linen items.
• Monitoring of linen washing activities in the laundry premises is done by CCTVs and Railway staff. Regular checks by officers are also conducted ensuring hygienic linen.
• Whito-meters are used to check the quality of washed linen items.
• Codal life of linen items has been reduced from the previously prescribed duration to allow for quicker induction of fresh linen items.
• War-rooms have been established at zonal Head-quarters and divisional levels to monitor/prompt action on bedroll related complaints.
• Eco-friendly packaging of bedrolls.
• Improved logistics for storing, transportation, loading and unloading of linen/bedrolls at station and on trains.
• Reservation against cancellation (RAC) passengers are also provided with complete linen set at par with other bone-fide passengers travelling in the coach.
• An additional bed sheet is also provided in bedroll kit to the passengers for using it as a cover of blankets provided.
• The blankets used in Indian Railways, as per current specifications, are lighter, easy to wash and provide good insulation to passengers for overall comfortable journey experience.

Pioneering steps of Indian Railways to improve the cleanliness of blanket :

1. Indian Railways have reduced the blanket cleaning time from earlier 3 months in 2010 to 2 months and since 2016 it got further reduced to 15 days .
2. ⁠In logistics challenging area it may increase to 20 to 30 days.
3. ⁠Also bring the fact that in normal houses blanket washing is done in rarest of the rare case. Most of the house use to do sun bath before winter and after winter.
4. ⁠Railways always gives two bedsheets to each AC passengers. One for the spreading over berth and second to use as cover to the blanket.
5. ⁠Also temperature of the AC coach is kept around 24, so that it would not require blanket and bed sheet is more than sufficient.

Good quality soft blankets are provided to the passengers having the features like Dimension of 2015 cms x 120 cms; Fibre content : 60% wool, 15% nylon, balance others; weight 450 gms/sq metre for maintaining the comfort.

Eastern Railway’s arrangement for mechanized cleaning of linen :

In Eastern Railway mechanised cleaning laundries are at six locations viz Tikiapara, Sealdah, Chitpur, Asansol, Malda and Bhagalpur having a total average capacity of washing 38 tonnes of linen per day with 2 to 3 shifts per day in all these mechanized laundries.

• After completion of every return journey of Eastern Railway owned trains, bed sheet and pillow covers are washed.
• Blanket are washed in after interval of 15 to 30 days or whenever it required.
• If any Dirty Blanket is found it is replaced and sent the dirty blanket for dry washing at laundry plant immediately.

Capacity of Eastern Railway laundry plant have been increased by setting up new machines like washer, dryer, calendaring machine (ironer). and dry cleaning machine.

All the laundry are operated by contractual staff which are strictly monitoring by Railway supervisors and officers. After every washing sample checking is done by Railway officials. If any uncleaned bedroll is found, it is sent for rewash.

Eastern Railway remains committed to enhancing the passenger experience and improving railway infrastructure across its network.