Wednesday's railway budget – a vote on account that is valid only till the end of the UPA-2 term around May – was an insipid one with nothing much for the city as far as future projects were concerned. Mumbai, however, got a fair share of trains, some express and some premium ones with dynamic fares.
While the Central Railway got the Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Howrah, Pune-Howrah, Mumbai-Patna and Mumbai-Gorakhpur trains on this AC premium circuit, the Western Railway got the Bandra Terminus-Katra and Bandra-Amritsar trains with fluctuating ticket prices.
These trains made an entry to the budget after the successful run of the Mumbai-Delhi premium train in the end week of December which earned approximately 48 percent more revenue than corresponding Rajdhani trains during the same period. As the name suggests, these trains offer no kind of discounts to passengers and the fares are driven by market demand.
Two other premium trains, the Nizamuddin-Madgaon and the Jaipur-Yeshwantpur, will have halts at Vasai Road. Officials said that all these routes tend to be absolutely packed during the peak season and it would be of great help to passengers who have almost negligible chance of getting confirmed tickets on these routes during peak season.
Apart from new premium trains, Railway Minister Mallikarjun Kharge announced regular express trains from Mumbai to Hubli, Chennai, Karmali, and also announced new services on Nagpur-Rewa and Pune-Lucknow routes. WR also got a few express trains from Bandra to Lucknow, Kanpur, Bhavnagar and Delhi Sarai Rohilla.
The minister also announced the feasibility study of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed line with the help of a Japanese agency. The report is to be submitted by the middle of 2015. However, railway officials didn't seem too excited about the project, saying that the studies had been going on for a long time and the project itself would require massive amounts of money.
"The project was supposed to start from Pune and go all the way to Ahmedabad through Mumbai on a line capable of speeds at almost 300 kmph. However, the Pune leg had to be curtailed after we realised that almost 40 percent of the cost of the project would have been exhausted in building the corridor through the mountainous Pune-Mumbai route. The Pune to Mumbai leg would have been a huge boost for the state as it would have almost made Mumbai and Pune twin cities in the true sense," said an official connected to the project.
The other announcement of semi high-speed trains was also met with lacklustre enthusiasm because officials said that even getting trains to run at anything between 160kmph to 200kmph on existing lines would be a huge task. "The semi high-speed plan involves upgrade of lines from the current average of 110kmph to 200kmph. It looks good on paper but in real time, it requires a lot of investment and doesn't look like the railways has that kind of money right now," said an official.
Putting the rail budget in perspective, a senior railway official said,"These new trains don't mean much for a city where the prime concern is the daily commute in suburban trains. That is not getting any better and it will take anything between Rs2,000 and Rs3,000 crore a year to get this system on track. Till then, these budgets don't mean much for the Mumbaikar."
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