Long route trains running to capacity

Our Correspondent

Ludhiana, October 18

With spurt in number of rail passengers due to festivals of Diwali and Chhath Pooja, travellers are on the receiving end as most long-route trains are running full to capacity. Even tickets in waiting list cannot be booked due to ‘no room’ (waiting list exhausted) in many trains bound for various destinations in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharshtra and North-Eastern states.

According to railway officials, reservation for the next week was not available in several trains, including 15708 Amritsar-Katihar Amrapal Express, 13050 Amritsar-Howrah Express, 13308 Firozepur-Dhanbad Ganga-Sutlej Express, 12318 Amritsar-Kolkata Akaltakht Express, 14650 Amritsar-Jaynagar Saryu-Yamuna Express and 13006 Amritsar-Howrah Mail, as even waiting lists were exhausted. In other trains, including 14674 Amritsar-Jaynanagar Shaheed Express, 12472 Jammu-Bandra Terminus Mumbai Swaraj Express, 12904 Amritsar-Mumbai Central Golden Temple Mail and 13152 Jammu-Sealdah Express, waiting list had crossed the 300 mark leaving no scope for passengers to get confirmed tickets.

Though the Railways claimed to have been running some 4,000 odd festival special trains across all zones and added additional coaches to existing trains to cope with heavy rush, passengers intending to travel to far off places felt that these were not enough.

Railway officials here said in the wake of heavy rush of passengers, two additional current tickets windows and two additional reservation counters were set up at the railway stations. In order to facilitate purchase of current tickets, officials were also deployed at ticket vending machines as majority of passengers were not able to operate these machines on their own, they added.

Meanwhile, the railway authorities announced cancellation of 12407 Newjalpaiguri-Amritsar Karambhoomi Express for the day while two trains — 12460 Amritsar-New Delhi Intercity Express (by 4.15 hrs) and 13006 Amritsar-Howrah Mail (by 5.30 hrs) — were rescheduled. Several long-route trains maintained their erratic run causing huge inconvenience to passengers.