South Central Railway has clocked 96.32 % punctuality in running of trains and has topped other railway zones in the country. Its punctuality in 2016-17 improved by 4.66 % when compared to 91.66% of 2015-16.
Western Railway and South Western Railway follow at the second and third position in terms of punctuality performance on the Indian Railways.
General Manager Vinod Kumar Yadav, who prioritised punctuality of train services as a focus area, observed that the stress on building up asset reliability in terms of maintenance of rolling stock including locos and coaches, overcoming shortcomings and monitoring train operations by the traffic department at various levels have been instrumental to the SCR’s rise to the top.
The Zone has also topped the Indian Railways in passenger earnings for 2016-17 at a high of ₹ 3,564.8 crore (₹ 252 crore or 7.62 % rise from ₹ 3,312.49 crore in 2015-16) moving 9.16 million more passengers (375.8 million vs 366.6 million). It had also earned close to ₹ 8,000 crore in freight revenue.
East Central Railway followed at the second position while West Central Railway, North Frontier Railway and Eastern Railway are placed at the third, fourth and fifth positions in the passenger earnings segment on Indian Railways.
While appreciating the staff for the achievements, Mr. Yadav has also directed officials to have a dynamic ready plan, basing on passenger traffic demands and run special trains and attach extra coaches so as to afford convenient rail travel option to users during the holiday season.
Advance planning was done in February itself to run special trains for the summer season and as a result about 440 summer special trains are being run connecting various destinations like Hyderabad, Tirupati, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Patna, Guwahati, Jaipur, Tatanagar, Bikaner, Kochi, Nanded, Nagarsol, etc.
An official spokesman said about 35 additional coaches are being attached each day to augment the carrying capacity of trains. That advance planning and implementation is paying off is amplified by the fact that during the initial 18 days of April 2017, the SCR earnings on the passenger traffic segment have shown an increase of ₹ 18 crore or ₹ 1 crore each day and passenger traffic too increasing by 10 lakhs during the same period.
The SCR runs 745 trains including include 270 mail/express services, 354 passenger services and 121 MMTS services daily.
