Things To Understand Before Quality Checks | Importance

Hello Friends,

Welcome to the next article continuing our learning journey to the in-depth Railway Electrification.

In this article, we are going to discuss some basics before understanding Quality Checks.

Study of Quality Checks | Quality Assurance

As you all might have heard of the falling bridges News and various other news regarding poor civil work and tragedies due to those. So, to ensure that no such case happens with the lives of 1000 who traveling in a train to reach their destination, and may get injured due to low-quality civil standards maintained to hold the mast which is responsible for providing supply to your high-speed train.

To ensure the proper quality, work is monitored on daily basis by the client. And if the work is unsatisfactory you may not get the payment for your work or might even get paid lesser than the cost of construction.

In technical terms, there is the Notebook known as ‘Daily Progress Report which the supervisor of the contractor company has to follow which includes-

• Location number (Km or Chainage),
• Type of foundation,
• Type of mast to be erected,
• Foundation volume,
• Scroll volume,
• Net volume, and
• the most crucial amount of cement bags to be used,
• Sign of supervisor and sign of client. (I would attach the image of DPR for your visualization of readers).

Before moving forward, Please understand the procedure of Bidding for Railway Electrification work.

There is an organization called ‘CORE’ (Central Organisation of Railway Electrification) which analysis the need for railway electrification in a particular region and now these quotes a certain amount for the completion of the project and passes it to the Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) like RITES, IRCON, RVNL, and many others.

These PSUs further bid these projects to the private contractors or the market player having work exposure and financial stability to complete the project within the stipulated time, and based on the bidding done by the various private companies, companies quoting the least for the project would be declared as L1, L2, and L3 (lowest 1,2,3..). And after proper document and verification, the project is allocated with a certain duration, now these company tries their best to get the project done and take the help of the labours and contractor having experience in the particular work processes which are further divided into :

1. Civil works like Foundation excavation, Control room buildings, and Staff quarters.
2. Mast Erection and Wiring Team: Done after the foundation work, the mast is erected either manually or by the tower wagon (Train in which a crane is fitted on one side and it picks up the mast and as per the instruction of the supervisor drops the mast at each foundation).

Corruption by the Contractor for Civil Work

As these contractors are paid based on meter cube (m³) work. They do in the whole month so, they might try to maximize their profit by completing more foundations per day resulting in a poor quality standard of work. And they use less amount of cement bags which add on to their profit, so to avoid all these certain checks are done

So in railways, we need to follow a certain set of rules known as ‘Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO).

So. these foundations which we have discussed need to qualify a certain set of parameters:

1. Grade of cement and quantity of cement bags used as per standards.
2. Mixing either hand-mixing or machine is used for the preparation of the mixture.
3. Size of concrete or small stones.

All these works require the expertise and supervision of someone who did his major in civil.

• What are the grades of cement used?
• What is the setting time of cement?
• What is the volume of the foundation?
• What would be the mixing proportion for better quality?

And the list is too long. So, would discuss all these in our next article. And you would surely be amazed at how mathematics calculation and civil know-how play an important role in carrying out this work.

Hope you gained some insights from this short Article.