Nearly two months after it suspended operations of passenger trains over the coronavirus crisis, the railways resumed the services with 15 pairs of trains on select routes from Tuesday.
The national transporter issued specific guidelines to passengers travelling on these trains which included asking them to carry their own food, linen, besides making it mandatory to wear face masks.
Initially, the railways announced the booking of the tickets on the IRCTC website from 4 pm on Monday, but the website crashed due to the huge traffic of prospective passengers.
The services of the portal resumed around 6 pm and in within 20 minutes, the Howrah to New Delhi train was completely booked. By 9.15 pm, approximately 30,000 PNRs were generated and reservations issued to more than 54,000 passengers for the next seven days.
Though the railways had suspended passenger services, it operated over 400 trains from May 1 to May 11 to ferry lakhs of migrant workers following requests from several governments.
A top official said the trains ferrying migrants were operated on requests of state governments and it was not part of Railways’ normal passenger services.
Stations covered by 15 trains
The trains will run at full passenger capacity, but railway zones have been instructed to ensure that there are separate entry and exit gates at stations to the extent feasible so that there is no face-to-face movement of passengers.
For now, the Railways has issued time table for trains to be run between May 12 and May 20. They will run as daily, weekly or bi-weekly trains, as per the time table issued by the Railways. There are no trains on May 16 and May 19.
These trains will run between Delhi and some major cities: Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.
On May 12, three trains will begin from New Delhi terminating at Dibrugarh, Bengaluru and Bilaspur. One each will begin from Howrah, Rajendra Nagar (Patna), Bengaluru, Mumbai Central and Ahemedabad, all terminating at Delhi.
On May 13, nine trains will be operated — eight of them starting from New Delhi and terminating at Howrah, Rajendra Nagar (Patna), Jammu Tawi, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Ranchi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. The ninth is a special train from Bhubaneswar to New Delhi.
The railways will run five trains on May 14 from Dibrugarh, Jammu Tawi, Bilaspur and Ranchi to the national capital and one from New Delhi to Bhubaneswar.
Three trains are scheduled on May 15, two of them from Thiruvananthapuram and Chennai Central and one from New Delhi to Madgaon.
On May 17, when the current lockdown is slated to end, a train is scheduled from Madgaon to New Delhi and one from New Delhi to Secunderabad.
The sole run from May 18 is a train from Agartala to New Delhi while two trains are scheduled on May 20 — New Delhi to Agartala and Secunderabad to New Delhi.
These special trains will have only AC classes i.e. first, second and third AC and the fares will be equivalent to Rajdhani trains.
The Railways has decided to begin select services so that at least the working class can be transported to their destinations.