The electronic display panels in Metro coaches, which show the names of the approaching stations, have been malfunctioning, alleged passengers.
On March 21, a New Barrackpore resident boarded a New Garia-bound train from Dum Dum. He was headed to Esplanade.
A little before 6pm, as the train entered Mahatma Gandhi Road station, a panel in the coach displayed “Dum Dum”.
“I had to look out of the window to see which station it was. The boards along the platform said Mahatma Gandhi Road. To make things worse, there was no announcement on the approaching station either,” said the passenger.
A day later, a woman boarded a train from Kalighat. She was headed to Shyambazar. “When the train was at Girish Park, a display panel showed Esplanade,” she said.
Regular Metro passengers are usually familiar with the stations. But people who take the Metro once in a while have to depend on the displays and announcements.
The New Barrackpore resident took a picture of the display board as the train entered MG Road station on March 21 and shared it with this newspaper. The board has Dum Dum written in English, Bengali and Hindi. A board on the platform shows MG Road.
“A couple of young passengers, who seemed to be students, were in the same compartment. They were supposed to get down at MG Road. They seemed very confused after seeing the display panel. They asked for help from co-passengers and had to rush to get off,” he said.
A senior Metro official acknowledged the problem, which, he said, was limited to a single rake.
“The display screens in MR412 rake were not functioning properly. There was a communication error. The problem has been taken care of,” said the official.
Metro could not verify if the New Barrackpore resident and the Tollygunge resident were on the same rake on different days.
The MR 400 series refers to Medha rakes, the new lot of trains built by the Integral Coach Factory in Perambur near Chennai. There are 16 such rakes in the fleet.
Metro engineers said a motorman, who operates the train, feeds an input while starting the journey. After that, the names of the stations get updated on their own.
“There are two ways — GPS-based updation and another based on the distance travelled. Since GPS signals might be irregular on the underground route, the software takes the kilometres travelled into account,” an engineer said.
“For example, if the distance between Dum Dum and Belgachhia is 2km, the display unit will update the station’s name when the train has travelled 2km from Dum Dum,” he said.
Metro Railway now has 30 rakes in its operational fleet in the north-south corridor between New Garia and Dakshineswar.
Thirteen of the rakes are of BHEL-make, said an official. The number of Medha rakes built at ICF stands at 16. Earlier this month, a train built in Dalian, China, was included in the commercial fleet, four years after arriving in Kolkata.
“If there is a malfunction, we will fix it as soon as possible,” said Kausik Mitra, chief public relations officer of Metro Railway.