A visit to Sanpada Car shed
date: 20 march, 2015
After months of going through the outdated as hell Partab book for electric traction (that book still exists in a world where it's still 90's) our college fortunately managed to arrange a visit to SNCR carshed, where the world is fortunately in 21'st century and has latest equipment possible.
Sanpada car shed is at...
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a walk able distance from Sanpada station, taking few minutes of walk in a residential area to reach there. After clearing the formalities we were allowed inside.
We were first taken to main shed where we were shown around the bogies. The bogies were of two types, the one which had Traction motors or the motor car ones had reduction gears installed on their shafts. The trailing cars's bogies had no such arrangements.
After going through other "arrangements" of bogies and being shown draw bars we went towards the electrical section of the shed.
there they had lots of spare VCB's, both types of pantographs (diamond/single arm) and transformers. we were told that diamond type pantographs were older and required more maintenance than the singe arm ones.
The presence of transformers prompted some questions from me which the sir who was guiding us answered by saying that along with Matunga and Kurla shed, we also carry out retrofitting of rakes for AC-DC service. One of the rake, which had come for retrofitting was shown and i could see that behind the normally closed doors of motor car type coach was kept a simple oil-cooled transformer for voltage transformation purpose. The rectifier unit is installed underneath the floor.
Sanpada Carshed also has test benches for testing equipment like Governors, master controllers, brake compressor etc.
I spotted one pure AC local (of Kalwa carshed) and asked about. I was told that the shed is upgrading it self for handling AC rakes also, a requirement that arises out of the need for conversion to AC over entire section.
we were in the end lead to "input" side of the car shed i.e. where the locals enter the shed for their daily maintenance purpose. The shed has a yard in front of it with manual switching (no electrically controlled turnouts). The locals have less than 6 hours* for their daily maintenance in which they are checked, cleaned, thoroughly scrubbed and send out, only for their coaches to be dirtied again by spitting of paan, as one employee there jokingly remarked. we were allowed to go inside cab and see the interior, where along with myriad buttons and gauges is a log book for making entry, a timetable which gives time taken to reach different stations after departing from station, and AWS indicator.
we then clicked a few pics, and were gently reminded not to post any of them online :(
this marked the end of my 3 hour visit to Sanpada car shed.
Thanks if you survived reading till the end of this :D
will add the handful of pics i have later.