Railway Board Chairman Suneet Sharma said that the normal transporter has reached the milestone of transporting 10,000 tonnes of Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) on its "Oxygen Express" trains on Monday, and the service now covers 13 states.
Nearly 160 Oxygen Expresses have transported 600 tankers and for the past few days, the trains have been delivering nearly 800 tonnes of LMO.
The service was launched in the wake of the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic on April 19 with seven empty trucks being moved out of Mumbai to be loaded with LMO.
"Despite the Cyclone (Tauktae), the Railways ran early this (Monday) morning two Oxygen Expresses from Gujarat to beat high winds and deliver 150 tonnes of oxygen while one of them left from Vadodara at 4 am with two RO-RO trucks and 45 tonnes of LMO for delivery in the Delhi region, the other left Hapa at 5.30 am with six tankers loaded with 106 tonnes of oxygen relief for deliveries for Uttar Pradesh and the Delhi region," Sharma said.
The Railways has been picking up oxygen from places like Hapa and Mundra in the West and Rourkela, Durgapur, Jamshedpur and Angul in the East, and then delivering it to Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Telangana, Punjab, Kerala, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, he said.
(Published 17 May 2021, 10:39 IST)
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