How to Track Railway Keymen Location & Routes with TrackoBit

Track railways keyman location, routes, and task progress with TrackoBit’s railway GPS tracking system. Read on what you all get. 

Railway keymen are the last line of railway defense. They have the biggest contribution to ensuring smooth and safe railway operations. After all, they see no day and night, rain, heat, or snow while patrolling the tracks to trace, fix, and report the faults.

The Ministry of Rail Transport across zones is struggling with major problems like delays in thorough site inspection and poor visibility of patrolling staff.

In light of this problem, the railway board has issued a statutory compliance. All zonal railways and their divisional and central officers must provide portable GPS trackers to their patrolman or keyman in railway. To facilitate proper monitoring of their patrolling activities and immediate communication in the event of an emergency.

Who is a Railway Keyman?

Railways keymen are skilled technicians who walk almost 3 to 8 km around assigned tracks with the necessary equipment to inspect and maintain tracks. Their role is to ensure all the tracks are sound and fully functional. They mainly,

• Adjust track components.
• Review and fix minor defects.
• Report any noted issues to higher authorities.

Tracking keyman in railways with foolproof software is a must to ensure that patrolling tasks are done in order and every assigned technician is carefully conducting the inspection task. Following is a brief on how TrackoBit helps in that purpose.

Why Must You Track Your Railway Keymen with a Railway GPS Tracking System?

Railway GPS tracking system lets you track your railway keymen’s live location, routes, distances, and speed, as ongoing patrolling, repair, and maintenance tasks. The software provides you with live visibility of your on-field crew. It helps monitor their movement, route history, total distance, deviations from scheduled tasks or routes, and work status. It offers deep insights into which checkpoints are visited or missed.

Moreover, you get diverse safety options like virtual geofencing, SOS button, halt sequencing, and timing with which you ensure your staff is safely operating around patrolling sites.

Having such live visibility lets you verify the crucial patrolling and repair tasks, and offers rapid emergency response. All these help contribute to the reliability and smooth operations of the railway infrastructure.

💡In a Nutshell! Tracking railway keymen with an Indian railways GPS tracking system ensures safety by enabling quick emergency responses, enhances efficiency by optimising workflow, and improves accountability. All in all, it aids in monitoring productivity and reduces risks associated with working in remote areas.

Track Railway Keyman Location & Routes With Railway GPS Tracking Software

1. Assign Routes & Set Halts Duration

TrackoBit’s smart route planning software provides feasibility to plan routes, sequence halts, set waypoints, and POIs. Allowing you to strategically define patrolling locations along with the duration of each halt. Get notified whenever the stay at the assigned location is exceeding. Ensure the tracks are visited on time for careful inspection.

2. Live Location and Routes Tracking

Having a flexible railway GPS tracking system makes it easy to track the live location of the key men and gangmen. You get up-to-the-minute live location updates all from sitting at distant divisional engineering control units.

Your quality control team can review the locations and monitor technicians’ routes with geo stamps and addresses — all in real-time over a map.

This level of visibility ensures that the assigned technicians have safely reached the assigned checkpoints and are thoroughly inspecting the tracks.

3. Monitor the Speed of Patrolling Vehicle

While patrolling and inspecting the tracks, maintaining an optimum vehicle speed is crucial. Under or overspeeding vehicles can often lead to overlooking defaults or gaps in the tracks and could become a reason for a major mishap.

Our Indian railways GPS tracking system provides you with real-time speeding or overspeeding data with alerts. You get up-to-the-minute reports of which patrolling vehicle violated the speed limits.

4. Alerts for Missed Checkpoints

Ensuring that no railway checkpoint is missed is very critical for running safe rail operations. Our GPS based railway tracking system  notifies you whenever an assigned checkpoint goes uninspected by the patrolling team.

Review all the missed checkpoints with data-led reports, and assess reasons for such gaps. Unearth the actual cause – whether an accident, negligence, or intentional. Duly act and re-assign staff to ensure no track is missed.

5. Get Inactivity & Battery Status

With our smart railway GPS tracking system, identify which staff is inactive at the job site. Receive detailed reports on GPS device battery status, on and off status, exception report, etc. This ensures your assigned keyman is well-connected to your divisional team at the backend.

Alongside, get instant alerts when your technicians try to tamper with the assigned GPS devices.

6. Updates on Patrolled/Serviced Sites

Notifying your staff’s halt period at assigned checkpoints is very crucial as it signals that the site was carefully and thoroughly inspected for issues. Many sectional and in-charge PWIs face this issue where their assigned technicians spend long hours at the same site and often miss thoroughly visiting or inspecting other planned sites.

This is a major issue, which is why TrackoBit’s GPS railway tracking system offers the option to define halt locations along with the period of staying at these locations. Get alerts whenever your assigned technicians’ aren’t moving as per the plan.

💡Do you know? The world’s total railway network spans over 1.3 million route kilometers.

7. Set Geofence for Forbidden Areas

Working across the railway tracks can be outright risky for your technicians. To ensure the utmost safety of your recruited staff, leverage our smart system to draw virtual boundaries (geofences) to ensure they are navigating around the safe zones only.

With our GPS based railway tracking system software, you can especially define prohibited areas and get alerted whenever key men accidentally step into such forbidden or restricted areas.

8. Send in Urgent Help with SOS Alarms

Our GPS tracking system syncs accurately with all portable GPS trackers featuring an SOS button. This feature comes in handy when there is an emergency on the site and the keyman requires instant aid. As they hit the SOS button on their GPS devices, our software shoots the alerts to provide rapid response.

9. Reports on Total Beat Length/Distance

Railway key men being the last line of defense are required to cover a beat of at least 8 km daily. When they walk collectively in groups as gang men, they cover almost 40,000 km while patrolling and fixing defects. In such a scenario, knowing the precise travelled mileage of keymen is very important as the railway authority evaluates it to justify their accomplished work and pay wages to them per travelled mile.

Our system auto-logs the travelled distance to calculate the actual mileage and covered distance. This helps evaluate the actual HOS and mileage to reimburse wages accurately.

Ensure On-time Inspection & Rail Operations with TrackoBit

We understand the severity of on-time inspections of railway tracks and networks. Ensuring the safety of keyman and traveling passengers is prime for any zonal railway board. Our team of TrackoBit helps support that purpose with an advanced railway GPS tracking system.

Our all-encompassing software aims at providing that much-needed visibility, updates and rapid response that helps railway authorities:

• Ensure everything is in order
• Every patrolling task is getting carried out as planned
• And every gap in the process or emergency situation is getting informed without any delay

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FAQs on Keyman in Railway GPS Tracking

• Who is a railway keyman?

  A keyman in railway is a skilled technician responsible for patrolling scheduled checkpoints. They are required to cover a beat length of almost 8 km daily while carrying essential fixing toolkits. They are entitled to inspect the tracks, ensure their upkeep, and report any major issue that requires immediate attention.

• What is railway keyman tracking?

  Railway keyman tracking means overseeing and monitoring the live location, routes, distance, and work status of the railway network’s key personnel such as track inspectors and maintenance workers to ensure their efficiency and safety.

• How does railway keyman tracking work?

  Keyman tracking works with GPS tracking devices and railway GPS tracking systems. The GPS devices shoot locational and geospatial data of scheduled keyman in railway to ensure compliance with work schedules and safety protocols.

• What are the benefits of GPS tracking systems in Indian railways?

  The GPS tracking software for railways helps in better management of resources, enhances coordination between technicians and divisional heads, improves safety, monitors work activities, and aids in providing quick response to any issue or emergencies.

• What kind of data is collected through GPS based railway tracking systems?

  Indian railway's GPS tracking system helps collect tons of data around keyman in railway such as their:
  1. Live, self-updating locational coordinates
  2. Movement history
  3. Missed checkpoints
  4. Work status, active, inactive status
  5. Deviations from scheduled tasks or routes
  6. Geofence entry, exit, violations
  7. GPS device on/off, unreachable data

• Can keyman tracking help with emergency response?

  Absolutely. TracKoBit’s Indian railways GPS tracking system provides keymen live location data and even triggers an alarm whenever technicians ring SOS buttons outfitted in their GPS devices. This makes it all quick and easy to coordinate and send in help in case of emergencies or unexpected situations.