Mumbai: Mumbai and suburban areas witnessed heavy rainfall on Wednesday due to which several streets were water logged. Even the public transport --Railway services on all lines remain suspended for some time and Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) buses was diverted, while the roads and highways reported traffic jam.
Resulting in, the Monorail witnessed huge crowd. The services were running normal carrying thousands of passengers on the entire day, however in the evening at 8:15 pm one of the running train towards Jacob Circle stopped some 400 metres after Bhakti Park station.
A Twitterati named Ashish Mahindrakar tweeted about the disruption. He said, “Near Bhakti Park monorail station there’s one monorail packed with passengers got stuck on top of water body for a long time. No help so far @monorail_mumbai.” He also posted a video of the stuck monorail."
According to sources, the disruption was reported because the coaches were carrying passengers beyond its capacity. On each station starting from Jacob Circle till Wadala bridge there were at least 300 passengers on each stations who were not ready to leave and requested the monorail operators to continue the services.
On demand the trains services was kept operational so the stranded passengers could reach to their desired destination. However, since the train was jam packed and overloaded the power supply was affected.
Although other rake was send to drag the stranded train but since the power supply restored the stuck rake was brought to the nearest Bhakti Park station. After 22 minutes the monorail services we're restored.
The four car monorail train has carrying capacity of 558 passengers. It is believed that people preferred to travel in monorail since the alignment passes from several low lying areas.
Besides, the monorail in a day usually witnesses 10,000 passengers between 6 am and 10 pm. While on Wednesday it recorded ridership of 13,500 up to 5 pm.
Interestingly, for the first time after Phase 2(Jacob Circle to Wadala depot) monorail services started it witnessed huge crowd on Wednesday. Twitterati also appreciated monorail authority for running the services during heavy rainfall.
