India launches eco-friendly, automatic train wash and it’s so cool to watch it in action

The outside of a train can get pretty gross pretty quickly after driving through pollution and all kinds of weather and nature. Just like cars, trains need to be washed too. And much like a car wash, trains must ride through a series of brushes and scrubbers in — you guessed it — a train wash. 

Bengaluru City Railway Station launched the first automatic railway coach washing plant in Karnataka, India. The eco-friendly train wash will reduce the water, cost, time and labor it takes to clean passenger trains manually. The automated train wash was commissioned by the country’s South Western Railway (SWR). 

The footage of a blue locomotive driving through the washing plant was shared by Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal and quickly went viral on Twitter

Video shows the train making its way through a group of tall scrubbers that wash off dirt or debris on the sides of the train. There’s also a set of spinning white buffers to polish it off. 

“Manual cleaning of coaches is time-consuming and labor-intensive and needs more water,” SWR’s general manager Ajay Kumar Singh told Scroll.in. “While around 1,500 liters of water is used to clean one coach in the conventional system, the new system needs only 250 liters.”

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