Mumbai: Union railway minister Piyush Goyal has asked the Central Railway (CR) authorities to start more 15-coach local trains in a bid to increase capacity in local trains. Officials who were reluctant to do the same, pointing to lack of infrastructure, were strictly asked by the railway minister to study the issue and start the trains soon. Currently, the CR authorities run only one 15-coach train while the 120-odd others are 12-coach trains.
Mr Goyal had held a closed-door meeting with railway officials on the Thursday night in which he pulled up the CR for not increasing its 15-coach fleet. The minister then asked why the number of the 15-coach train is limited to only one on CR while the Western Railway (WR) has recently inducted its third. An official said, “The CR officials tried to explain that there are some issues in CR that the WR doesn’t have, like the space crunch that will hamper the signalling work and the extension of the platform, but the minister seemed in no mood to listen to what he said were excuses.”
Multiple sources said Mr Goyal came down hard on the officials and even went to the extent of warning them about “thinking things through” before giving these excuses to the minister of railways.
Another official said, “The meeting was quite unnerving for us railway officials in Mumbai, the meeting has set a very intimidating tone with respect to what we should expect for whatever term that Mr Goyal is the railway minister.” CR divisional railway manager Ravindra Goyal said, “For now I can only say that the meeting was to look at some solutions for the Mumbai suburban.”
