Indian Railways News => Topic started by railgenie on Apr 19, 2012 - 06:00:09 AM


Title - Harrowing time for Mumbai commuters
Posted by : railgenie on Apr 19, 2012 - 06:00:09 AM

A major fire that broke out inside the signalling cabin at Kurla late on Tuesday threw out of gear the suburban train services on the Central Railway’s mainline, inconveniencing lakhs in Mumbai all through Wednesday.

Following the disruption in the suburban services on the mainline of Central Railway since the morning, office-goers could not make it their work places and thousands of students had a tough time making it to their examination centres.

Owing to the fire at a signalling cabin at Kurla during the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, the automatic signalling system in the area has been disconnected. “We are repairing the defective signalling system. It will at least 36 to 48 hours before we can normalize the services,” a CR spokesperson said in the evening.

The services on the mainline and harbour networks of the Central Railway, which carry a staggering 38.65 lakh commuters every day, remained affected all through the day. “We could not operate many services early in the day. By 8 pm, we operated 72 per cent of the total 1,578 services that we run every day,” the CR spokesperson said.

“On Thursday morning, we would scale up the number of services to the 80 to 85 per cent level....we would be working overnight,” the CR spokesperson added.

Western Railway authorities allowed the commuters to travel on their suburban trains. They were also allowed to travel by long-distance trains which halted at all stations between Kasara-Kalyan and Karjat-Kalyan sections.

Thousands of students appearing for various university examinations either could not make it to their examination halls or were late in reaching there. The authorities of the BMC-run BEST and state-run MSRTC deployed 200 additional buses to ferry stranded railway commuters.

There was a massive traffic jam along the Eastern Express Highway, following disruption in train services. Officials of University of Mumbai are meeting on Thursday to discuss and decide on re-examinations for students who missed their exams.

Meanwhile, the delays and cancellations in long-distance trains have marred the holiday plans of thousands of people, leading to frayed temperatures at CST, Dadar, Kurla, Thane, and other important stations of the Central Railway.