Thaindian News

Mumbai, Nov 22 (IANS) In a major relief for commuters, the Central Railway Tuesday announced it would operate all its main line suburban services with 12-car trains from Wednesday.

The measure comes 25 years after it operated the first 12-car train on its Mumbai suburban network.

From Wednesday, all the 785 services on the mainline will be operated using 12-car rakes instead of the existing 9-car rakes, providing a major relief to its over five million commuters, a CR official said here Tuesday.

With this, its main line passenger carrying capacity has been augmented by a whopping 35 percent, though most services on the Harbour Line would continue to be operated with 9-car rakes.

In the past three years alone, CR hiked the number of its services from 1,410 (2008-09) to 1,573 presently, an increase of 11.50 percent.

It increased the number of coaches into service from 13,998 to 16,896 during the same period, marking a hike of 20 percent.

Starting with a lone 12-car rake on its network way back on Sep 8, 1986, today CR now has a total of 117 rakes with the entire main line operation being converted to 12-car rakes.

Incidentally, the Western Railway suburban network, which had introduced its first 12-car rake 25 years ago (along with the Central Railway), has now graduated to offering 12 services daily using 15-car rakes.

Of its total 1,210 services daily using 76 rakes, Western Railway operates as many as 1,002 services using 12-car rakes and 196 using 9-car rakes, (besides the 12 services using 15-car rakes), an official said.

A Western Railway official said that the last stage of converting the entire suburban section from DC to AC current is currently progressing on a war-footing.

“Only the stretch between Churchgate-Vile Parle in Mumbai is left to be converted. We plan to do it before March 2012,” the official told IANS.

After that, it would be able to augment services and the length of the rakes significantly to provide a relief to its nearly 3.40 million daily commuters.

However, a proposal to introduce air-conditioned local trains has been shunted to cold storage due to technical reasons, though field trials were carried out a few years ago.

Acknowledged as Mumbai’s lifeline, the two suburban networks now move a total of over 8.5 million commuters daily to and from their homes and workplaces all over the city.