One of the major foresights of the 2016 Railway Budget is that Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has attempted to decongest the stations of national Capital that caters to over 300 trains everyday and about two lakh passengers. Just on the lines of road transport peripheral Expressway in Delhi NCR, Railways will develop a railway corridor between Meerut and Panipat enabling several North and West bound trains to skip Delhi. Once completed, railway officials said that it will keep out more than 100 trains which now run via Delhi.
Sources said that the Meerut-Panipat railway line has been vaguely mentioned in the State projects list of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The railways have planned to take this project with utmost importance since studies revealed that 90 percent of trains were delayed due to congestion between Delhi-Ghaziabad-Allahadbad-Mughalsarai section.
The distance would be shortened by 90 kilometres between the two cities as against travel time and distance between the two cities via Delhi. “More than 100 trains travelling between Bihar, UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab take the circuitous route via Delhi. Trains bound for these States would take Meerut-Panipat route hence spare time for travelers,” explained a senior railway officer. Projects to decongest Delhi roads are already being carried in the form of Eastern and Western Periphery.
Prabhu in his budget speech also talked about punctuality performance of passenger trains and said it has been a matter of concern for several decades and stated measures are being put in place where atleast 95 per cent punctuality can be maintained by 2020.
“We have a porous network which leads to rampant infiltration by humans and animals. Problems are compounded by congestion in tracks, terminal capacity constraints and asset failures. The worst affected is the busy Ghaziabad to Mughalsarai section through Allahabad and Kanpur which spreads across three Zonal Railways thereby impacting the overall punctuality of the entire network. We initiated the audit of operations on this section to improve performance. Some improvement is already visible and capacity augmentation in the medium term will further reduce the delays,” Prabhu said in his rail budget speech mentioning about the first ever National Railway Plan.