Track‑clearance breach warning
The Railway Board has flagged violations of track‑clearance rules by station masters and instructed zones to enforce proper procedures tied to wheel‑sensing systems and related safeguards. (railhunt.com)
India’s Railway Board has warned its zones that station masters are breaking track-clearance rules during signal faults, creating a risk of trains being sent onto lines that have not been properly verified. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The order, reported on April 9, 2026, says only a station master or assistant station master can authorize a train to enter a track when an axle counter wrongly shows the line as occupied. Axle counters are wheel-sensing devices that count train axles in and out of a block section to decide whether the track is clear. (deccanherald.com) When that system fails, the rule is not to guess. The station master must manually confirm the track is actually empty and only then arrange a reset before another train moves. (devdiscourse.com) The Board acted after finding cases in which station masters verbally passed that responsibility to signal maintainers or engineers. The Economic Times, citing All India Railway Trackmaintainers Union general secretary Prakash, reported that signal staff then reset the axle counter based on the station master’s word. (infra.economictimes.indiatimes.com) That matters because the safeguard is designed to keep one person clearly accountable before a train is admitted to a line. If the reset is done on assumption instead of physical verification, the failure point shifts from a faulty machine to a faulty operating decision. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The union said there have been several such cases and pointed to one recent case in Visakhapatnam in which two signal staff were removed from service. That example has turned a technical operating rule into a staffing and accountability dispute inside Indian Railways. (infra.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Rail Hunt, which first highlighted the Board’s concern in Hindi, also linked the warning to wider complaints about pressure on station masters and signal staff. The same outlet has previously reported labor disputes between station masters and signal maintainers over who is being made to carry safety risk in day-to-day operations. (railhunt.com) The Board’s instruction is narrow but blunt: zones are to enforce the existing procedure, not improvise around it. On a railway that depends on layered checks, the message is that a false “occupied” reading must end with a verified reset, not a verbal shortcut. (deccanherald.com)
