Title - More room on tracks

Mumbai, Delhi, Patna or Calcutta? With Jamshedpur schools pressing the summer vacation button, families can hardly wait to chug out of town. With flight options too costly and too few for comfort, trains continue to be the mainstay mode of vacation travel. To meet the demand, South Eastern Railway (SER) is attaching extra coaches to long-distance trains and launching new summer-special trains. Trains passing by Tatanagar to get the facility of extra sleeper coaches include Howrah-Mumbai Geetanjali Express, Sambalpur-Howrah Ispat Express, Puri-New Delhi Purushottam Express and Howrah-Ahmedabad Express. An extra sleeper coach was introduced from May second week to Tata-Alleppy Express, Tata-Yeshwantpur Express and Tata-Amritsar Jallianwala Baug Express. According to railway officials, each extra sleeper coach can accommodate 108-110 passengers. The SER also introduced a weekly special train, the Patna-Bilaspur Express with a Tatanagar stopover, from mid-April. The Patna-Bilaspur Express will run till June-end. It is for the first time that such a train was introduced between Patna and Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh). The SER also launched a summer weekly superfast special train between Santragachhi near Calcutta and Lokmanya Tilak Terminus (LTT) in Mumbai via Tatanagar. "With school summer vacation on, the rush to go out of the city has increased manifold from May first week. Keeping this in view, the railways decided to attach extra coaches to long-distance trains and introduce special ones," said Tatanagar station manager Rajesh Choudhary. Officials at Tatanagar's computerised railway booking counter said waiting lists for trains such as Geetanjali Express, Purushottam Express and Howrah-Ahmedabad Express touched the 200-mark. An official did not rule out "No-room status" in some trains for Mumbai and Delhi.