International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Accidents at railway level crossing in India have claimed the lives of 1539 peoples over the past decade. Of those 1125 deaths have occurred in unmanned level crossing which goes to an average of 112 peoples per year. The main reason behind this is that the unmanned level crossing numbering 18,200 is a shocking 52% of the total number of level crossing. This positively puts road users in great peril. The government of India is hesitant to create these level crossing manned considering the huge capital it needs to invest i.e. approx. 2450 crores towards labour cost per annum and Rs.700 crores per annum towards maintenance and operational cost would be needed. Other options like constructing bridges or subways may amount to 400,000 crores. To avoid the above said tragedies, this system gives the intelligent remedy by automating the entire level crossing using 2.45GHZ RFID. The main motivation behind this idea is that this RFID implementation demands a surprisingly low cost of approximately 200 crores for the whole country. The basic plan is to place individual RFID tags with unique ID in each train .These tags will be read by readers placed adjacent to the tracks strategically positioned a definite distance away from the level crossing. The train is detected by the RFID reader and is sent to microcontroller for comparing with predefined data and open/close of gate using stepper motor/hydraulic system. This can be used in any rugged environment if train passes through.