Deja vu for commuters: WR gets back old rakes

It’s been more than a fortnight that 37 lakh people are forced to travel crammed in the rickety and slow moving rakes; and this is because the Western Railway (WR) has brought back the old rakes and included them in their fleet.

These are the rakes which have less appealing coaches, fans that hardly circulate air, cob-webbed tube lights, smaller windows and crammed doorways. The officials from WR said that they have inducted these old BHEL-make rakes as the number of daily services has been increased to 1,355 from October 1.

“We have 100 rakes in our fleet, of which 14 per cent is kept for routine maintenance. But now we have increased our fleet for operations to 89 rakes,” said a WR official.

Until September, WR used to run 86 rakes that operated 1,323 services every day. But as they have increased the number of services by 32, they are pressing the older rakes into operations. For the past few years, WR had been operating only the new trains that can touch 100kmph unlike these older rakes that don’t go beyond 80kmph.

“We have to be perfect as far as maintenance of rakes is concerned. We cannot afford more rakes to have technical failures and have margin of error, else we will lose the daily punctuality count,” said a WR official.

These BHEL-make rakes are known to undergo technical failures and breakdowns, especially during monsoons. Moreover, the remaining codal life — each rake can operate for 25-30 years depending on the maintenance — is barely 6-8 years for these rakes.