CR admits to goof-up; first 12-coach for Harbour soon

A day after The Asian Age brought to light that the Central Railway (CR) did not fulfil the promise made by general manager, Sunil Kumar Sood of adding 10 new services on the Harbour line from Monday, the CR admitted its goof up. In fact, to make up for it, officials said the Harbour would see its first 12-coach train within a fortnight.

This paper in its edition published on April 13 (‘CR fails to keep promise of running 10 new services’), had pointed out that these additional services that were to be started on April 11 were in fact nowhere to be seen. Mr Sood had made the promise to the media on Saturday night, on the eve of the Harbour line’s conversion from Direct Current (DC) to Alternate Current (AC). The CR’s divisional railway manager, Amitabh Ohja held a press briefing on Wednesday to clarify the issue and said that the CR will not run any new services as of now but that the Harbour line will get its first 12-coach train. “As of now we will not be increasing services but in fact increasing the capacity of the current system. In a fortnight we will run one 12-coach train that will give us 10 to 12 services per day and in a another few months we will keep adding more 12-coach trains in the system until there are no nine-coach rakes remaining,” said Mr Ojha.

Although Mr Ohja guaranteed the overall capacity of the Harbour line will be increased by 33 percent in the coming months, he said, “Until now we were under the impression that the work related to 12-coach would not be completed, which is why the 10 services were announced. But as recently we’ve got information the work at Dockyard station will be completed within the given time-frame and hence it would be more logical to wait for the line to be converted to 12-coach.”