Signature campaign by rail passengers’ association in Tirupur

The Tirupur Rail Passengers Welfare Association has commenced a signature campaign among the season ticket holders and frequent train travellers from Tirupur in order to mobilise voices to draw the attention of Railway officials to their demands for better services and improved connectivity.

“The Tirupur station is mostly neglected though sizeable chunk of revenue was generated by the Railways from here both in the passenger and cargo segments. Almost ten trains are still not stopping at Tirupur, despite it being an important station,” J. Gunasekar, president of the Association, told The Hindu.

K. Jaganathan, executive member of Association, said that large number of season ticket holders travelling out of Tirupur in the Nagercoil-Coimbatore passenger and Coimbatore-Erode passenger trains in the evening hours face lot of hardships.

“Announcements through public address system are extremely lethargic in the case of these two passenger trains as waiting passengers are quite often left stranded waiting indefinitely for the train without knowing the exact time of arrival. Even the information centre at the station is frequently empty,” he added.

On new trains, the Association members would be pressing for an express train starting from Tirupur to Chennai and extension of Coimbatore-Erode passengers to Salem on all its trips.

“At the moment, Coimbatore-Erode passenger runs up to Salem only during its afternoon trip which is of no use to the office goers and labourers commuting to workplaces. The services of the said train in the morning and evening hours start and end in Coimbatore-Erode sector thwarting the claims of ‘extension’ of the train to Salem announced last July,” Mr. Gunasekar pointed out.

The lack of roof along the entire stretches of both the platforms in Tirupur railway stations and inadequate number of counters to issue daily tickets were other issues.