On Saturday, Indian Railways began operating 80 (40 pairs) of additional trains across the country. The list includes India’s first semi-high-speed train, Vande Bharat Express, which began operating between New Delhi and Varanasi after an interval of more than 170 days.
Indian Railways suspended Vande Bharat Express operations on March 23 after a nationwide lockdown was imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the country. However, the second Vande Bharat Express train operating between New Delhi and Katra remains suspended
As of now, the Indian Railways have launched the New Delhi-Varanasi Vande Bharat Express, which will operate five days a week except Monday and Thursday.
However, on the first day of its operation, the premium train experienced a low occupancy rate with only 2% of passengers booking tickets on this train.
“This is just the first day. Many trains are weekly, biweekly and so on. Reservations for those trains are expected to improve as we get closer to those days,” said a rail official.
The train will have the number 02435 that will leave Varanasi at 3 pm for New Delhi and the 02436 will leave New Delhi at 6 am for Varanasi.
With railways declaring that they have introduced special trains in areas where there is more demand and tickets are on the waiting list, only three of the 80 have managed to obtain even 50 percent occupancy on the first day of reservation, according to the data.
It is important to note that when the railways announced that reservations were open for the 15 pairs of trains running on Rajdhani’s routes from May 12 and the 100 pairs running from June 1, all tickets were booked in about few hours.
Earlier, at a press conference, the chairman of the railway board, VK Yadav, said: “Eighty new special trains or 40 pairs of trains will start operating from September 12. operation.” Yadav said the railways will monitor all trains that are currently in operation to determine which trains have a long waiting list.
“Wherever there is demand for a particular train, wherever the waiting list is long, we will operate a clone train before the actual train, so that passengers can travel,” he said.
The key factor in deciding the 80 new trains was the fact that there were many stations from which migrant workers returned to their workplace, Yadav said.
* With inputs from agencies
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