Title - East Coast Railway emerges fastest growing freight-loading zone

KOLKATA, JULY 2:   In the first quarter (April to June) of the current fiscal, the Bhubaneswar-headquartered East Coast Railway (ECoR) accounted for 49 per cent of the total incremental freight traffic of the Indian Railways. ECoR has thus emerged the fastest-growing freight-loading zonal railway.

During the period, ECoR handled 37 million tonnes (mt) of originating freight traffic, up from 31.35 mt in the same period of last year, or an incremental traffic of 5.65 mt and IR as a whole 256.31 mt (244.81 mt), or an incremental traffic of 11.5 mt. In fact, ECoR posted more than 18 per cent growth against the national average of 4.7 per cent. In June alone, ECoR's growth was 22 per cent at 12.28 mt (10.04 mt).

Indra Ghosh, General Manager, ECoR, attributed this to system improvement achieved through a slew of measures entailing strict monitoring and improvement in working.

Ghosh, however, concedes that in terms of actual volumes, the Bilaspur-headquartered South East Central Railway (SECR) tops all the zonal railways. During the period under review, SECR handled 37.18 mt, against 32.37 mt in the same period of the previous year, posting a growth of 2.23 per cent. “In July the performance should be much better as the recently initiated steps will start yielding results,” he observes. Ghosh is also the General Manager of SECR as an additional charge.

He draws attention to another interesting aspect. During the period ECoR’s daily average handling of wagons was 6,152, which was more than 300 wagons handled by SECR. In other words, SECR’s wagon utilisation is better as it handled more cargo with fewer wagons.