Railway activists have asked Central Railway (CR) to review and get rid of level crossing (LC) gates at the earliest, after failure of one at Bhivpuri station on Friday morning that resulted in a rail-roko of more than five hours at Badlapur.
LC gates have been a staple of the suburban system ever since the railway line was built by the British, and allow public to travel from one side of a suburb to the other either on foot or by vehicle. However, with the frequency of services having increased over the years, these gates have become a sore point for the railways as they affect punctuality of trains.
Activists said that the plan for building Rail-over-Bridges (ROBs) as alternatives to LC gates should have already been chalked out and its execution completed. “The problem is that railways cannot stop people from using LC gates overnight. They have to first build ROBs to provide motorists and pedestrians with an alternative to get from one side to the other,” said activist Lata Argade.
Commenting on the need for coordination of local civic authorities in moderately far/far-off suburbs like TMC or KDMC, Ms Argade said, “These LC gates were not an issue say a decade or two ago because there weren’t that many services whose punctuality they could affect. However now, officials and representatives of these suburbs need to get together and see to it that ROBs are built.”
CR officials have said that trains lose tremendous amount of time as a result of these gates. An official on condition of anonymity said that the Diva LC gates alone are opened 38 times a day with the highest frequency between 8am and 10am. Similarly, LC gates at Thakurli, Kalyan, Kalwa and Ambivali need to be opened 13 times a day because of which nearly 80 to 90 trains get delayed by 10 minutes on an average per day.
Subhash Gupta, a member of the Divisional Railway Users Consultative Committee (DRUCC), CR, said that railway officials had been trying to remove LC gates as fast as they could but they were unable to do it speedily. “They have shut down one LC gate at Chunabhatti on Harbour in the past six months or so and that’s mostly it. We have so many to go and the job is not being done with the kind of urgency it deserves,” he said.
Nearly two years ago, Union railway minister Suresh Prabhu had declared that all LC gates would be shut down on the Mumbai suburban. The minister had also declared that a fund of '20,000 crore would be needed to build ROBs as alternatives throughout Mumbai including CR’s mainline, harbour line and the Western Railway.
