In a move to improve punctuality of services and reduce overcrowding in trains, top Central Railway (CR) and Western Railway (WR) officials are mulling experimenting with non-stop trains during peak hours. With this in mind, the CR has even conducted a survey for a feasibility report on the issue.
The CR has mapped out a plan to run non-stop trains from Kalyan, Thane and Dombivali up to CST with a halt only at Dadar. These trains, it hopes, will help take in a massive chunk of the morning crowd, with eight such services arriving at CST in an hour.
CR general manager Sunil Kumar Sood has asked senior officials to monitor and run a few trains on an experimental basis through which a feasibility report will be made and submitted to the railway board, “In the coming few months, we will be looking into whether the experiment can be done on the CR. We have already done some preliminary work in which we have found that Kalyan, Dombivali and Thane are all stations with heavy footfalls in the morning and so this means that if we have those limited fast non-stop services that will originate from these stations and have Dadar as the only station where a stop is given, it might solve a lot of our problems,” said Mr Sood.
CR is also considering the removal of rain gutters, using which the commuters hang outside the train during peak hours, “Other than the rain gutters, we are planning to send the railway police force to start collecting their own evidence via images and videos of commuters hanging dangerously outside the train,” he added.
The WR too will experiment with the fast trains between the Borivali and Andheri section. Senior WR officials have said that the experiment has already failed once but they are looking into more permutations and combinations. “In the first experiment, we ran the train from Churchgate to Borivali and between Andheri and Borivali non-stop. We are planning to re-introduce this again as this train will leave from Churchgate around 6. 40 pm which technically is not a peak hour,” said a senior WR official on condition of anonymity.
