NEW DELHI: Learning to live with the pandemic, the railways on Sunday announced the resumption of passenger services in a phased manner from Tuesday with 15 trains (30 return journeys) to start with. Ticket booking can be done only through the IRCTC website from 4 pm on Monday.
The 15 pairs of trains will originate from New Delhi station and connect places like Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.
Parallelly, the Centre decided to increase the number of special trains for migrants so as to stop them from walking their way to their home states. From the current 80 trains daily, it has been decided to run 100 Shramik Special trains on a daily basis, according to sources.
This was decided in a high-level meeting chaired by Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba who sought the cooperation of state governments in running them. Gauba’s appeal came a day after the West Bengal government and the Centre engaged in barbs over ‘preventing’ Shramik Special trains from entering the state.
As for the normal passenger services, more such trains would be resumed based on the availability of coaches. “Railways shall start more special services on new routes, based on the available coaches,” the railways said.Only passengers with valid confirmed tickets will be allowed to enter the stations. The schedule of the trains will be announced in due course.
