First monorail rakes arrive in Mumbai, to be mounted in January

The first four fully-loaded rakes of the country’s first monorail landed at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust early Sunday morning.

The blue-coloured rakes were brought to the Wadala casting yard after they were unloaded from the cargo ship onto huge trawlers.   

The first monorail was unveiled by MMRDA commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad in June this year in Rawang, Malaysia - which has a plant of Scomi group that constructs the monorails for Mumbai.

“That train was the prototype of the first actual train that we have brought to Mumbai on Sunday,” said Suhaimi Tan Sri Yaacob, country head of Scomi India.

Now that the first fully-loaded train is in town, the next important job will be to unload it. “Though it looks rather simple for a layman, unloading and unpacking of the four rakes is a rather tedious job. Our men will require at least two more days to actually finish unpacking and unloading it. We also have to do a thorough checking for any damages which may have occurred during the journey. We expect to mount the rakes on the beam in Wadala depot by the end of January 2011,” informed Yaacob.  

With the arrival of the rakes, the Scomi and Larson and Tubro consortium officials will speed up the work for the Wadala depot. “We expect a train to be delivered every month beginning January. A lot of fine-tuning with the first train also needs to be done, including testing work and other minute details,” added Yaacob.
He also informed that apart from a few minor delays in the time table, the rolling stock has been on schedule so far. 

In the first phase, the Mumbai monorail will run between Wadala and Chembur. In all, there will be 15 monorails, with each having four rakes and a passenger-carrying capacity of 600.

The MMRDA has already made a claim that the civil work for monorail will be completed by March next year and the authority officials expect that the first phase of monorail will be functional by June 2011.