Train services on the Central Railway (CR) were disrupted on Saturday morning due to a technical issue in Tata Power's supply to the rail network. As per CR officials, the power outage affected trains on the Kalyan-Kasara-Igatpuri and Kalyan-Karjat-Lonavala routes, which span more than 150 kilometres in total.
Railway sources mentioned that the electrical supply line close to Thakurli experienced a fault that caused the system to trip. Swapnil Nila, the chief CR PRO, stated that train services were affected because of an issue caused by Tata Power.
According to sources, the supply cut out, leading to the diversion of power from substations and lines into the network.
"The conductor coming from Tata Power suffered a technical failure. One phase has been restored, and they have informed us that the second phase will be restored soon" stated a CR official.
Statement issued by Tata Power on Central Railway Chola Substation Disruption
Tata Power issued a statement regarding the supply disruption at Central Railway Chola Substation, caused by a lightning arrestor failure in the Kalyan lines.
At 0601 hrs today, supply on one of the lines was interrupted due to a lightning arrestor failure at the Central Railway Chola Substation. Tata Power stated that further attempts were made by Central Railway to restore supply from another line without isolating the fault.
However, due to the fault condition persisting at the railway end, sparking occurred on the other line, leading to its shutdown. This subsequently caused a complete shutdown of the Central Railway Chola Substation, impacting a load of approximately 30 MW.
Tata Power clarified that its supply from Kalyan was consistently available to Central Railway on one of the lines. Despite multiple attempts by Central Railway to resume supply, the prevailing fault condition prevented successful restoration.
According to Tata Power, the supply was finally resumed at 0650 hrs after Central Railway isolated the faulty equipment at their end.
Throughout the period, Tata Power ensured the availability of supply to Central Railway from one of the lines. The statement also mentioned that the issues of no supply to the railway system were due to the lightning arrestor failure at the railway end.
The outage caused trains operating on the system to lose power from the overhead equipment (OHE) cables, leading to a complete stop of the trains. The Kalyan-Lonavala stretch had this problem from 6.05 am to 6.55 am, whereas the Kalyan-Igatpuri stretch encountered difficulties from 6.08 am to 7.08 am.
According to sources, trains experienced delays of 20-30 minutes. Since it was a Saturday, there were fewer people on the trains. Mandar A, who lives in Dombivali, stated that local trains on these routes were delayed by 25 minutes, and individuals were posting updates about it on private social media groups due to the lack of clarity of information available.
