Mumbai: Multiple tripping in electricity across Mumbai suburban on both Central and Western Railway led to around 250 trains being delayed for hours late Friday night and the delays continued on Saturday morning at the tripping persisted.
The disruption to services started around 7.40 pm on Friday and commuters were delayed by hours with some still travelling back home as late as 1 and 2 am on Saturday.
The tripping continued on Saturday morning, with trains being delayed for 15 minutes from around 8 am.
Sources from the railway have said that they were not ready for the heavy drizzle and were left pulling their hair out, trying to find out what went wrong. The problem started on the Central Railway (CR) on the Sanpada to Mankhurd section, Matunga to Kurla section and then Vidyavihar to Kanjurmarg sections on the fast line towards Kalyan just around the time that the peak hour crowd was about to reach home, around 7.40 pm.
It was not just CR but Western Railway (WR) too, that suffered electricity tripping. Though the tripping was witnessed in areas like Jogeshwari, the disruption started late in night, which is why comparatively the damage to services was lesser.
The delays continued on both CR’s mainline and Harbour on Saturday morning after a few drizzles were seen in the central suburbs and Navi Mumbai. Around 15 trains were delayed and two to three were cancelled on Harbour, railway officials said.
Railway activist Nirmal Tikamgarh, who has been working with the railways on improving suburban railway, said this raises the question on how well prepared the railways is for the monsoon. He said, “It rained for hardly half-an-hour and you saw what kind of mess was created, so one can’t help but feel that during the monsoon the situation will be worse.”
CR public relations officer V Chandrashekhar said, “There was failure in the train but this caused only four cancellations on the mainline on Saturday morning.”
When contacted over the issues faced on their line, WR public relations officials did not get back.
