Central Railway fails to keep promise of running 10 new services

Central Railway (CR) has failed to fulfil General Manager Sunil Kumar Sood’s promise of 10 new services on Harbour line, starting Monday. Mr Sood had promised that these services would be introduced on the line Monday onwards however officials said that unless all trains were converted to 12 coaches, additional services were out of question.

Both the Harbour and Trans-harbour lines were already given extra services and the new timetable came into effect on January 26 this year. During this time, Harbour got seven while Trans-harbour saw an addition of 22 services. CR came out with new timetable booklets for commuters, and updated the same on the mobile application, m-indicator.

Officials, however, said that changing the timetable again in three months was unlikely as conversion of Harbour from nine to 12 coaches would be a game-changer. “Initially, our challenge will be to see whether we can run the current number of services on Harbour once we switch to 12-coach trains, because more coaches take longer to clear signals. Also, these coaches will eat into our cushions between two services as well,” said an offical on condition of anonymity.

CR is to get another rake from WR, which is why additional services are being considered. “One rake adds around 10 services to the system but we currently need nine additional 12-coach rakes to convert the Harbour line completely to 12-coach trains,” the official said.

Mr Sood had made the promise on the eve of the Harbour and Trans-harbour line’s conversion from Direct Current (DC) to Alternating Current (AC) on Saturday night. On the other hand, the Harbour line faces the immediate issue of delayed trains and decreasing punctuality. Trains have been delayed by as much as 10 to 15 minutes on harbour during peak and non-peak hours as the system is getting acclimatised to 25,000 volt AC. Mr Sood did not answer any of our calls or messages.