The Western Railway (WR) has said it will install fencing on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route by May next year to prevent animals from straying on the tracks and being run over by trains.
Addressing a press conference at the Railway Zone Headquarters at Churchgate here on Friday, Western Railway General Manager Ashok Kumar Mishra said that tenders have been invited for the construction of fencing on the 620 km long route, which will cost Rs 264 crore. are supposed to.
The third semi-high-speed Vande Bharat Express flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 30 between Gandhinagar in Gujarat and the country's financial capital has collided with cattle four times so far.
The latest incident took place on Thursday evening between Udvada and Vapi stations in Gujarat. According to Western Railway officials, the stainless steel fence will be a "W-beam" structure at a height of 1.5 meters from the ground.
We are going to install it (W-beam) at a height of 1.5 meters, Mishra said. The advantage is that people can cross it but animals cannot.
He said that Railway employees as well as Railway Protection Force personnel are visiting villages along the tracks to talk to people to remove the problem (of stray cattle on the way of trains). Mishra said that this design ensures that animals do not get entangled in the lower part of the rake after such a crash.
Sumit Thakur, Chief Public Relations Officer of Western Railway, said that the Vande Bharat service is running with an average occupancy of 130 percent and has become very popular among passengers.
Meanwhile, Mishra said that the Western Railway has got two additional air-conditioned suburban trains, though he did not give a date as to when these would start. Currently, out of 1,383 suburban services operated by Western Railway in Mumbai, 79 are air-conditioned.
WR officials said the daily average passenger count in 2022-23 was 25.68 lakh (so far), while it was 15.12 lakh in 2021-22, 7.72 lakh in 2020-21 (both coronavirus-affected years), 34.87 lakh in 2019 -20 and was 35.44 lakhs in 2018-19.
Mishra said the decline in passengers as compared to pre-COVID-19 levels was mainly due to employees switching to 'work from home' mode and shifting offices to the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) in suburban Mumbai. Mishra said Western Railway was thinking of increasing the services as per the changed travel pattern.
Asked about changes in suburban travel patterns, Mishra said there was no strong likelihood of many commuters switching to private vehicles, though he agreed that some may opt for the metro rail.
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