Central Railway (CR) has postponed starting 12-coach services on the CST-Andheri route owing to pending work at King’s Circle.
Central Railway (CR) has postponed starting 12-coach services on the CST-Andheri route owing to pending work at King’s Circle. CR was expected to run services on this route last week itself but work at Mahim delayed the project. Parking space for one rake was to be created at Mahim which took longer than expected and now, leveling of tracks at King’s Circle has further pushed the deadline.
CR had promised that Harbour line would be completely converted to 12-coach by the end of July, however officials said that CST-Andheri had unexpectedly proved to be the most difficult patch. “When we were working on the Panvel-CST section by increasing length of the platform etc., we hit hurdles at Dockyard Road because of the rock and signal pole at Vadala but no one expected that there would be so many hurdles on the western line connection,” said a railway official on condition of anonymity.
CR has been converting Harbour line services from CST to Panvel and CST to Andheri to 12 coach trains for a few months now and is getting old coaches that ran on Western Railway (WR) to do so. “The overall capacity of Harbour will be increased by 30 per cent overall once everything is 12 coach,” the official added.
Harbour line was given an extra of 22 services this year as compared to 14 to the mainline and conversion to 12-coach is being looked at as major capacity augmentation on the line.
