Chinese team gets feel of city’s railway system

A delegation of 42 Chinese railway officials visited the sprawling Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) on Tuesday to get a feel of how we run such a huge railway system.

CR general manager Subodh Jain said, “The Chinese delegation wanted to see how the Indian railway system works.”

With Chinese engineering capturing the world’s imagination in a big way with the high-altitude Tibetan railway and the high speed Beijing-Shanghai Bullet Train network, railway officials said the Chinese could learn a thing or two from Mumbai as well.

“Here is a system which runs on two different electric tractions (AC and DC) at the same time, has trains of different lengths, and possibly has the world’s worst case of train overcrowding — all this on finances which are extremely thin,” said a senior CR official.