Looks like the summer heat is finally drawing people to use the air conditioned local trains on the Western Railway. Since the start of this year the number of daily passengers using AC locals has jumped by more than 340 percent. In fact, on April 4, the WR achieved an achievement by carrying more than 53000 passengers inside AC local on the 60-kms route on Churchgate-Virar.
This comes at a time when a parallel mass transit route – though barely covering Dahisar to Goregaon/Malad – has started via Metro-7 and Metro-2A which was inaugurated by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray. And and until April 4, there were 1.03 lakh passengers who travelled on these two new Metro rail routes.
According to WR officials, in the first four days of April, they have already seen just around 1.07 lakh commuters using the AC locals. If we break it down then the daily average comes to more than 26600 commuters. The WR sold 4966 journey tickets and 2063 season passes in April out of which 1597 tickets and 1052 season passes were sold on April 4. This took the total daily passenger count to more than 53400 on April 4. Sources in WR explained that as per their calculations, they consider a monthly pass to comprise 50 trips considering 25 working days.
Getting into the details, the statistics shows that month on month the total number of people travelling inside AC locals are increasing. In March there were 4.76 lakh passengers, 3.14 lakh passengers in February and 2.44 lakh passengers in January this year; who used AC locals to commute. Breaking it down gets the average daily number of passengers to around 15355 for March, 11214 in February and 7871 in January.
Between April 21' to March 22', the WR carried 15.44 lakh passengers inside AC locals that fetched them Rs 6.57 crore earnings. The WR operates 28 services of AC local that runs on Churchgate-Virar Main line on slow and fast corridors and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus-Goregaon Harbour line. One of the biggest issues for AC local trains is that the frequency of services are irregular which dissuades people from buying tickets and passes.
“I firmly believe that the railways should reduce the fares of AC local and improve its frequency if they want more footfall,” said Anand Shirali, resident of Andheri.
The issue of lowering fares for AC locals has been on the plate of Indian Railways; a proposal for the same has also been sent to the Ministry in Delhi. However the authorities there right upto Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw; have not taken a decision. Primarily the proposal is to reduce the single journey ticket fares at par or around the fares and distance stipulated for Metro-2 and Metro-7A routes of MMRDA. In the near future, Mumbai is supposed to get 238 AC local trains at a cost of around Rs 20000 crore for which tenders shall be called in June 2022. These shall be procured under MUTP-3 and MUTP-3A projects being implemented by Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation.
