Abstract:
Different countries use different models to condemn railway wagons once they reach
the end of their service life. However, in Sri Lanka, such transparent method is not
being used. The method currently practiced mainly depends on the experience of the
assessors. The Sri Lanka Railway (SLR) has 53 types wagons in its rolling stock and
wrong decisions to condemn wagons can lead to considerable loss to the SLR and
country’s economy in general. Therefore, this study focused on developing a
decision supporting mechanism to condemn the train wagons in SLR by assessing
their status using a well-defined and transparent mechanism. The objectives were to
study the existing procedures for valuation and condemning process of BCGS in
SLR, to develop a decision support mechanism to condemn BCGS and analyse the
scrap value in a transparent manner, and to evaluate the mechanism. Data were
collected using documents, and surveys, interviews and focus group discussions with
relevant 18 employees in the SLR. Then, the decision support mechanism was
developed based on Microsoft excel. Finally, it was evaluated by letting 3 evaluators
to assess the status of two wagons of different conditions using the existing and the
proposed mechanisms. The proposed decision support mechanism showed
consistency compared to the current method. Extension of the developed method to
encompass other types of units in the rolling stock is proposed as future work.
