Indian Railways has a reputation of never being on time
The Indian Railways recently announced that it has achieved 100 per cent punctuality of the passenger trains. This feat has never been achieved by the Indian Railway system. The previous best was 99.54 per cent on June 23 when only one train didn’t reach on time. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal posted on Twitter that Indian Railways made history on 1st July 2020 by achieving 100 per cent punctuality rate.
Trains in the Fast Lane: Enhancing services to unprecedented levels, Indian Railways made history on 1st July, 2020 by achieving 100% punctuality rate. pic.twitter.com/zqNXFNx4Z6
— Piyush Goyal (@PiyushGoyal) July 2, 2020
How Indian Railways achieved this feat?
Looking at the reputation of the Indian Railways, it is a very big deal that we have achieved 100 per cent punctuality. It is not easy because of all the constraints our Railway infrastructure faces while running a train in a designated time-frame and path. However, we should keep this in the mind that very few trains are running currently because of the COVID-19 norms. Circumstances are very different from the pre-COVID-19 times when more than 13,000 passengers and 8,000 goods trains were run every day. The Indian Railways is running just 230 passenger trains and 5,200 goods trains currently.
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While there was a lockdown and no trains or a limited number of trains were running, maintenance of tracks was carried out in critical sections in a quick time. This increased the average speed of trains and stretches of slowing down were minimized.
Better and modern signalling is also credited for India to achieve this feat. Also, the railway authorities are ensuring better operations analysis and planning. The entire organization was focused even at the divisional level.
How does the delay of trains affect the overall system?
Normally when a train gets delayed, it cannot be accelerated to make up for the time. The train network system is built in such a way that a train hardly has the leverage to achieve its pre-set path and time due to a large number of trains. Any train that gets delayed due to any reason while on a journey, it theoretically eats into the path of some other train as the time slot is allotted to various trains on a track. Later it depends on priority, which train will be passed first. Normally Rajdhani and premium trains are given priority over other normal express/mail trains.
Usually, trains which are running on time are not disturbed for trains who have suffered delays along the way and are out of the path. If needed, goods trains are stopped as they are not that time-sensitive and these delayed trains are given a path.
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