The waiting time for all trains passing through or getting terminated at Vijayawada Railway station will come down considerably with the South Central Railway installing the Route Relaying Interlocking Facility.
Vijayawada is centrally located on the railway map and trains from Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bangalore come in or go out in three different directions, but a technical lacuna prevented officials to allow any train from any direction onto any one of the 10 platforms. This difficulty had led to trains waiting at the outer signals agonisingly for long duration.
In some cases passengers get down from the compartments and walk to the nearby road point leading even to fatal accidents on a couple of occasions.
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Trains coming from Visakhapatnam side used to get restricted to platforms 1 to 4 and those coming from Hyderabad or Chennai to a few others. With the major work likely to begin after the monsoon rains, all the tracks would be inter-connected with overhead power lines laid to facilitate taking in any train onto any platform, Vijayawada Divisional Railway Manager Anurag told
These works would, however, entail cancellation of several express/passenger trains for at least 3 weeks and some trains may be rescheduled or diverted to take up civil construction works at the Railway Yard in the city. This facility, which was felt necessary following increase in number of trains about 10 years ago, was pending for execution.
“People will be given three months' notice for cancellation/diversion of trains so that no inconvenience was caused to them, while making advance reservations,” Mr. Anurag added. The entire facility was likely to be operational by February-March 2012.
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