Rail infra revamp to take a year

Mumbai: The Western Railways (WR) has in its audit report highlighted a slew of measures for dispersing the crowd in a controlled manner such as the building of seven new FOBs at railway stations including the Elphinstone-Parel, but officials have said that it will take at least a year for all these plans to be implemented.

An official said, “We know that the work needs to be done, but due to a lot of restrictions and the tendering process it will take a year to build a new FOB at Elphinstone.” He added, “The other plans like skywalks too will take from one to three years. It means that we will have to work with the BMC and make sure that the work does not cause any problems as we will have run our trains as well.”

The issue of removing the old structures like pyaus and unused toilets will be addressed in the next four to six months.

An official said, “It will take time as we have to do these things while running the trains and they are shut for barely four hours.” The WR has also brought four additional divisional railway manager last week, which will exclusively work with the suburban Mumbai railway.