Indian Railways bonanza for passengers! Soon, Indian Railways travelling between Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata will not have to worry about getting train tickets. In the next five years, trains running on the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata routes will be free from waitlisted tickets. The announcement was made by Chairman of Railway Board, Vinod Kumar Yadav recently. He was quoted in a PTI report saying that at present, Indian Railways is working on three additional dedicated freight corridors (DFCs). These corridors will be developed at an estimated cost of around Rs 2.6 lakh crore over the next 10 years. According to Yadav, the corridors will help Indian Railways free up the existing tracks to run enough passenger trains so that no one gets waitlisted tickets.
Yadav said that the construction of DFCs is under works and some of them are likely to be completed by 2021. With the opening of these corridors, Indian Railways passengers can expect to travel easily without worrying about waitlisted tickets on the two busiest routes of Indian Railways, Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah.
The vision of the national transporter is that when DFCs are completed, the existing routes will be freight-free, following which passenger trains can be run on demand, he said. The Railway Board Chairman further stated that the work to upgrade train speed on these busy routes to 160 km per hour has already been sanctioned. This will be done in the next four years.
According to Yadav, the thrust of Indian Railways is to commission DFCs. The 194 km long Bhadan-Khurja section of Eastern DFC has been completed and from October 2019, commercial trials have started on this corridor. Also, the 305 km long Rewari-Madar section of Western DFC has been completed as well and from December 2019, commercial trial runs have started on this corridor.
The Railway Board Chairman has also said that the approval to increase the average speed of passenger trains by 60% has been given which will make train journeys by Rajdhani Express fully overnight. Earlier this year, Modi government’s Cabinet approved the ambitious plan to upgrade two important branches of the Golden Quadrilateral – Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah – to 160 kmph speed. With this, Indian Railways hopes that train journeys between Delhi-Mumbai will take around 10 hours, and those between Delhi and Kolkata will be completed in 12 hours.
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Source: Financial Express
