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Passengers' body wants Konkan Railway's monsoon timetable scrapped

KR is the only train operator in the country that adopts an alternate schedule for its trains between June 10 and October 31 because the Konkan region, through which the train line passes, faces heavy rainfall and occasional landslides.

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File photo of a train on a Konkan Railway route
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A passenger association from Mumbai that has been taking up issues related to Kerala-bound trains has now written to the Prime Minister's Office to scrap the monsoon timetable of Konkan Railway (KR). The Western India Passenger Association's (WIPA's) contention is that the timetable is curtailing the efficiency of the route, causing cascading delays of trains and leading to fuel and man-hour losses.

KR is the only train operator in the country that adopts an alternate schedule for its trains between June 10 and October 31 because the Konkan region, through which the train line passes, faces heavy rainfall and occasional landslides. During this period, trains are run at lower speeds to avoid derailments from landslides. In order to avoid large-scale losses of time due to lower speeds, the train timings are altered. This was implemented after two accidents occurred on KR. In June 2003, 23 people were killed when the Karwar-Mumbai holiday special derailed near Vaibhavwadi, while in June 2004, the Mumbai-bound Matsyagandha Express derailed near Ratnagiri, killing 14 people.

However, the monsoon timetable is now getting its fair share of brickbats. "It is foolish to think that such alterations can be used to avoid any untoward incident. This timetable is run because it allows Konkan Railway to spend on contract work in the guise of monsoon preparations. In fact, the monsoon in Mumbai and the Konkan region is from June to September, so why have a timetable all the way till the end of October? It should be investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation and that is why we have appealed to the prime minister," said Thomas Simon of the WIPA.

The KR officials believe that the route has several speed restrictions and caution orders along its stretch of approximately 740km, and it would take a few years to remove these. "As of now, the monsoon timetable is unavoidable.

Maybe a few years from now, when we have completed patch doubling of the line, we can think of scrapping the timetable," said a senior KR official.

A set of railway officials are of the opinion that the decade-old monsoon timetable can now be shelved. "It is an attempt to avert a calamity by slowing down things artificially. It just creates a huge bottleneck in a single line route that is among the busiest in the country. It is better to invest in technology and come up with long-term geo-technical engineering solutions rather than creating a timetable that slows down train operations," said a senior railway official.

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