Railways passengers to get reservation on demand with plans of massive capacity augmentation

Soon passengers will get train ticket reservation on demand for all premier and mail/express trains as the railways has decided to undertake a massive capacity augmentation drive on its major trunk routes.

Besides tickets on demands, plans are afoot to run trains at 160 km per hour speed in Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes and gradual increase of speed of all trains including goods service.

We have decided to run trains at 160 km per hour speed in Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah sector, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said here on Friday while focusing on the need for increasing speed of trains at the Economics Editors conference.

Addressing the media through video conferencing, Prabhu said capital expenditure in railway sector has been increased significantly in the last two years and it will go up further.

"Our Capex is Rs 1.21 lakh crore for this year which will go up to Rs 2 lakh crore subsequently. The fund is spent on expansion of railway infrastructure like doubling, new lines, electrification," he said.

Spelling out the target for the next five years, Chairman Railway Board AK Mital said "Our aim is to provide ticket reservation on demand and increasing the speed of all trains including freight."

Besides, improving punctuality rate upto 95 per cent from the current 80 per cent, Time-Table for freight trains and zero-fatalities on tracks are some of the ambitious plans being charted out by the Railways for the next five years.

Mital said the infrastructure development will decongest the routes helping increase of train speed and highlighted the fact that upcoming Dedicated Freight Corridor will be a "game changer" for railways.

The East and West Dedicated Freight Corridors will be operational by the end of 2019 and that will be game changer as freight trains will be shifted to these corridors leaving adequate space for passenger services, he said.

The Eastern Corridor from Ludhiana to Dankuni (1840 Kms) and the Western Corridor from Dadri to Jawahar Lal Nehru Port (JNPT) (1502 Kms) are being constructed for exclusively movement of goods trains.

Once DFC is operational, we will be able to run more passenger services and also increase the speed of all trains, he said.

He said the speed of Mail/Express trains which are running at 50 km per hour speed currently will go up to 80 KMPH as per the plan and freight trains which are at present running at 25 KMPH will go up to 70 KMPH at DFC.

On zero fatalities, he said railways will eliminated all unmanned level crossings, which are major cause of accidents, to achieve the zero rate accident in the next 4/5 years.