Southern Railway’s Palakkad Division on Wednesday handled a new stream of freight traffic when it dispatched a container freight train carrying polypropylene-loaded containers sourced by the Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) from Mangaluru to Gujarat.
CONCOR, a Navarathna subsidiary of Indian Railways, acquired KIOCL’s Railway Siding at NMPA in March 2017 to boost its container traffic between the coastal area and hinterland. Containers loaded with polypropylene granules were brought on trucks from Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd. (MRPL) on Tuesday and loaded on flat wagons at the CONCOR Railway Siding at NMPA.
The polypropylene granules sourced from MRPL is a byproduct of petroleum refining and used as raw material for processing different plastic-based material, including plastic bags, containers and cups.
Palakkad Railway Division’s spokesperson M.K. Gopinath told The Hindu that the freight is meant to reach Khodiyar (Ahmedabad) in Gujarat. CONCOR loaded polypropylene from its NMPA siding for the first time, he noted.
As many as 90 containers, each weighing 16 tonnes, were loaded on 45 flat wagons of the freight train. Each container comprised 640 bags of polypropylene granules with the total load comprising 57,600 bags (1,872 tonnes), he said. The Container Corporation is expecting to dispatch at least four such rakes in a month in the coming days.
MRPL, CONCOR, Southern Railway, Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd. and NMPA joined hands together to make the new stream of traffic a success.
MRPL Executive Director (Projects) B.H.V. Prasad, KRCL Director (Operations), KRCL, Santhosh Kumar Jha, CONCOR’s Group General Manager, Chennai Cluster, K. Srinivasan, MRPL GGM (Marketing), Deepak Prabhakar, KRCL’s Regional Railway Manager, Karwar, B.B. Nikam and Panambur Railway Station Manager G.P. Rajesh and others were present when the freight train was dispatched on Wednesday. CONCOR acquired the siding facility of KIOCL when senior Indian Rail Traffic Service officer Anup Dayanand Sadhu was heading the Karnataka unit of the corporation as its Group General Manager. The four full-line siding (900 m each) was built by KIOCL at a cost of ₹14 crore in 2004 to handle iron ore exports.
