Railways to operate Rajdhani, Shatabdi trains soon

Indian Railways decided to increase the number of train operations as it is planning to restart the services of more Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duronto, and Humsafar in a phased manner.

At present railways is operating 682 special trains and 20 cloned trains. It will also be running 416 festival special trains from October 20 to November 30 to meet the festival rush.

Popular Bhopal Shatabdi will resume its service from October 17 between New Delhi to Bhopal. IRCTC to restart the services of two of its Tejas trains between Lucknow-New Delhi and Mumbai-Ahmedabad trains on October 17.

The Railways halted the operations of normal service on March 22 to check the spreading of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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"The railway is in touch with state governments and monitoring the ticket booking pattern. Whichever the route and trains have more bookings in such route another express train, which is also called clone train, will be operated," said an official in the railways.

In November first week, the railway will review the situation and make a decision on operating more trains.

"The Railways has not decided when it will normaise the train operation. It is assessing the situation on daily basis. Whenever there is a demand for the train, the railway will operate special trains," Railway Board Chairman V K Yadav said.

Some of the railways' coaches converted as Covid-19 coaches to treat Covid-19 hit patients.

"Whenever we think that the Covid-19 coaches need to be used for special trains, we will induct these coaches back in a phased manner keeping some coaches as standby. They can be modified within a day or two," Yadav said.

A total of 5,231 Covid-19 Care coaches have been made available by the Railways for use of state governments for very mild or mild novel coronavirus cases, but they did not find many takers except Delhi Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

"The Covid Care coaches were developed to help the state governments because of lack of infrastructure. Our coaches have been kept in standby mode and we will deploy them wherever needed. We really don't know the real coronavirus situation as of now," Yadav said.