Rail commuters can look forward to speedier travel with Railways set to reduce the running time of 80 trains by five minutes to an hour.
For this, Railways will increase the speed of these trains, mostly express services, to the permissible 110 km an hour. “This will mostly reflect in the railway timetable that will come into effect from July 1,” Divisional Railway Manager Rajesh Agrawal told The Hindu .
The initiative will increase line capacity enabling Railways to operate more trains. This will come in handy for Railways, which is finding it difficult to introduce the newly sanctioned trains in the rail budget.
A team led by Mr. Agrawal had recently covered 500-route km from Vallathol Nagar, near Shoranur, to Melepalayam in Tirunelveli, boundary of the Thiruvananthapuram railway division, in two days to clear bottlenecks for implementing the initiative.
Railways have also initiated steps to overcome several hurdles such as platform availability. Besides they will have to go for sequencing and scheduling of trains, monitoring of trains at coaching depots and stations, and revise the guidelines among other things for reducing the running time.
The “speeding up” will be resorted to without affecting the timings of the trains. Almost all trains plying through the State are sticking to the timings despite the accelerated infrastructure works and the availability of only one line for operations.
The maximum speed on the 600-km Shoranur–Mangalore stretch has also been increased from 100 kph to 110 kph. The decision to decrease the running time of the trains comes close to a proposal mooted by the divisional railways to limit the number of stops for the superfast trains to six on the Thiruvananthapuram- Shoranur stretch.
