As winter descends across the northern parts of India, a familiar white curtain of dense fog often brings the nation’s bustling transport arteries to a standstill. While highways witness dangerous pile-ups and airport terminals overflow with stranded passengers, the Indian Railways emerges as the resilient backbone of national mobility. Even in near-zero visibility, the railways remain the most operational transit mode, bridging the gap between isolated cities and keeping the heart of the economy beating.

While dense fog brings slowness to railways too, it still remains most dependable transportation in times of thick fog.Indian railways have clear advantage over roads due to the fact that railway is a guided movement that works through a fixed signalling system.Further, the installation of GPS enabled fog-pass devices strengthens train operators’ ability to navigate by giving them real-time information about signals and speed restrictions on a track.Thus, it would not be a surprise if one see Vande Bharat cruising at 130 kmph even on foggy days.This system is further complemented with on-ground patrolling of tracks which are very frequent and any anomaly is advised to control centre in advance to prevent accidents.Infact, special drives are taken to keep tracks in good health and retro-reflective sign boards are placed to bring more visibility to operators.Ofcourse, this does not mean accidents due to unexpected tresspasing by humans or animals will not happen but larger collisions are largely avoidable.

Train to train collisions occur largely due to signalling issues which are being tackled by Indian Railways through its ambitious project of Kavach which will provide real time cab to cab signalling and automatic braking incase of unsafe distance between trains.Once this happens, Indian railways will further get an impetus to run on higher speeds with more reliable degree of safety.Foggy season once again reveals why modernisation of railways is going to yield long term impact on Indian economy especially by bringing more mobility in harsh climatic seasons.Interestingly, winters season is also a season for travel due to holidays and the same is catered by Railways by running special trains to clear the seasonal rush.

While roads are understandably unsafer in fog due to lack of any patrolling system and lack of any guided movement but even airlines which fly above the atmosphere are also not able to fly resulting in frequent cancellations and choked travel plans.This is primarily because the airlines have advanced landing instruments like category-3 but the technology for take off is not so advanced that even in thick fog they can take off safely.Thus, in many a case, flights get cancelled due to their inability to take off.This leads to major travel choas with both roads and airlines struggling in foggy conditions.While railway also faces similar challenging conditions but its nature, system and technology makes it the ‘Mr Dependable‘ of the foggy season.