New Delhi: Indian Railways to completely restructure its trains time-table! The implementation of a new timetable for Indian Railway trains around 500 regular trains will be discontinued and 10,000 stops will be scratched. According to an IE report, the new timetable will be adopted once the COVID-19 pandemic is over and passenger train services return to normal. The national transporter aims to increase its annual earnings by more than Rs 1,500 crore with ‘zero-based timetable’, states the report.
According to the internal projections of the Railway Ministry, this estimated extra earning will come without increasing the fare charges. It will be the timetable’s byproduct and will happen as a result of operational policy tweaks.
There will be room to run 15% more freight trains at higher speeds on exclusive corridors. Along with it is projected that the average speed of passenger train services will increase by around 10% across the Indian Railways network.
The new zero-based timetable is developed by Indian Railways along with experts from IIT-Bombay, it seeks to re-imagine operations from scratch. According to the sources quoted in the report, the following are some of the broad principles of the timetable:
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Trains with below 50% occupancy on average in a year will not run. If required, such train services will be merged with other trains, more popular ones.
There will be no stops for long-distance trains within 200 km of each other unless there is a major city enroute.
The removal will take place only in respect of certain trains, and there will be some other trains to serve these stations.
All passenger train services will be operated on a “hub-and-spoke model”. The cities with a million or more population, where all long-distance trains will terminate, will be hubs.
While as per the timetable, smaller places will be linked to the hubs through connecting trains.
Suburban networks like the Mumbai local trains, will not be affected.
The new timetable will rationalize the utilization of the rolling stock available with the national transporter. The train sets will either have 22 LHB coaches or 24 ICF coaches. Additionally, the new timetable also envisages the use of overnight trains with 18 coaches.