Mumbai Monorail commissions rake rebuilt using local spare parts

Two years after taking over the operations of Mumbai Monorail, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) on Wednesday commissioned a rake, rebuilt

Two years after taking over the operations of Mumbai Monorail, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) on Wednesday commissioned a rake, rebuilt by sourcing close to 213 spare parts from local vendors in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.

Commissioning of Monorail RST05 at Wadala Monorail station, on Wednesday. (Pratik Chorge/HT)

MMRDA rebuilt the train at a cost of ₹8 crore and also sought the help of professors from the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) and Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) for testing and commissioning the train.

Officials said that sourcing the spare parts was a major challenge as the trains were originally manufactured and assembled in Malaysia, and MMRDA did not have any technical know-how of the spare parts. Most of the spare part vendors were also based in Germany, Korea and Canada.

MMRDA is looking at operationalising one more train by the next week to improve the frequency from 30-35 mins currently to around 18 minutes. This means the Mumbai Monorail will operate with a total of seven trains from next week.

“Though we had 10 trains from the contractor, two were completely destroyed by the ex-contractors and one train was burnt in an accident. But we successfully refurbished two trains with a cost saving of about 74% when compared to foreign vendors,” said RA Rajeev, metropolitan commissioner, MMRDA.

The authority has also invited bids to procure 10 additional rakes and is looking at getting more response from Indian companies. “Apart from sourcing indigenous spare parts vendors, we also had an in-house team for fitment and assembly of the parts,” said DLN Murthy, chief operating officer, Mumbai Monorail.

The 19km corridor from Chembur to Sant Gadge Maharaj Chowk was fully operationalised from March 2019.