Infrastructural Care: Repairing Railway Trains, Maintaining Mumbai’s Lifeline

ABSTRACTMumbai’s suburban railway network is one of the largest, most densely-packed public transport systems in the world. Known as the city’s ‘lifeline,’ these trains carry eight million commuters every day and provide crucial connectivity. Drawing on fieldwork at a railway carshed, this article uses infrastructural care as an analytic to ethnographically explore how practices of preventive and corrective maintenance not only repair trains but are also crucial in maintaining spatiotemporal flows produced by urban infrastructures. Repair and maintenance involve a distribution and convergence of human and nonhuman agencies that simultaneously reveals the ontological multiplicity of trains while also stabilising them as sociotechnical assemblages. In doing so, repair attempts to render faults knowable to predict and prevent failures, which then instantiates new routines across the traction rolling stock. However, carshed engineers also face bureaucratic pressures of ensuring both punctuality and safety, thus necessitating the managing of maintenance within increasingly saturated capacities.KEYWORDS: CareinfrastructuremaintenanceMumbairailway trainsrepair AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the Railway officials, engineers, and workers at the carshed for giving me the opportunity and permission to conduct fieldwork. I am indebted to them for taking the time to share their knowledge, experiences, insight, and wisdom. I am thankful to Anna Bohlin and Ruy Blanes for their supervision, guidance, and encouragement. I would also like to thank my PhD colleagues, Signe Askersjö, Mathias Kristiansen, and Anders Lauridsen, for their comments on earlier drafts. This manuscript also benefitted from feedback I received at the SGS Publication Workshop with Florian Kühn, Sofie Hellberg, and Kilian Spandler. Finally, I am also thankful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped sharpen the analytical arguments of the previous manuscript draft. The views expressed in this article, and any shortcomings or drawbacks therein, are mine alone and do not represent the policies and/or practices of the Indian Railways.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 All names are pseudonymised in this article. Following the usual convention at carsheds, I add the suffix ‘sir’ or ‘mistri’ – which also indicate organisational or professional roles – to the names of my interlocutors.2 In all these instances, workers followed prescribed safety protocols, such as de-electrifying overheard cables, attaching earthing rods on them, putting ‘Do not operate’ signs on the trains, and so forth.3 Being a commuter was something I had in common with almost all my interlocutors, which helped establish rapport and inspired several conversations around the experience of travelling in local trains. Like them, I am also deeply and personally aware of how these trains are Mumbai’s literal and metaphorical ‘lifeline,’ having been on the receiving end of several breakdowns. This was an important inspiration in designing and conducting this doctoral research project. I would like to thank the third anonymous reviewer for encouraging this reflection.4 According to the white paper Corporate Safety Plan (2003–2013), ‘Corrective maintenance comes into play only after an equipment becomes defective. Preventive maintenance, on the other hand, is applied when equipment is still operative and proactive treatment is given consisting of checks, examination and supervisory inspection’ (Ministry of Railways Citation2003).5 Vaughan (Citation2011: 690–691) defines analytic ethnography as ‘an approach to field observations and interpretation of individual interaction that involves careful collection of data and evidence-backed arguments. It relies on systematic methods and standards, assumes that causes and explanations can be found, proceeds inductively to formulate explanations of outcomes, and holds theory and theoretical explanation as core objectives. The analysis developed is conceptually elaborated, based on interrogating the relationship between concepts, theory, and data, and aims for generic explanations of events, activities, and social processes.’6 While this article is limited in looking at repair and maintenance at the carshed, it is important to note how infrastructural care more broadly reflects other interventions and practices that take place across the railway network assemblage. These include scheduled ‘block’ periods of track and overhead equipment maintenance, which usually take place on Sundays and between the first and last services of day, as well as inspections carried out by line staff at stabling lines, and periodic overhaling of EMU rakes at workshops.7 However, not all breakdowns are related to failures in EMU rakes. For instance, ongoing track maintenance requires the implementation of speed restrictions which often cause delays, as do faults in the signalling system or adverse weather events like rain and fog.8 I would like to the first and second anonymous reviewers for their suggestions which helped clarify my use of faults, failures, and breakdowns.9 Workers explained this in terms of ‘duty,’ which refers to an eight-hour shift. Uninstalling the traction motor, running a function test, and then reinstalling it would take one duty each, or collectively about 24 h – a long time for an otherwise functional train to be detained at the carshed.10 Workers and engineers observed the original guidelines prescribed by the Indian Railways’ Research and Design Standards Organisation (RDSO) while undertaking these refurbishments.11 While a detailed discussion of risk and cultural theory is beyond the scope of this article, I am aware of how key insights from the sociology of risk are relevant to a discussion of contemporary railway problems both in India and the world. This includes the socialisation of risk and privatisation of profit under neoliberalism (see, Bear Citation2020). I would like to thank the third anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to my attention.