The Harbour line was shut for more than one hour and was not operational for more than two hours on Tuesday morning due to a technical problem.
The Harbour line was shut for more than one hour and was not operational for more than two hours on Tuesday morning due to a technical problem. As a result, 35 trains were cancelled and more than 60 trains were delayed for 40 minutes to an hour.
The incident saw the suspension of services from 7.50 am to 9.11 am. It was brought about when a train that had failed at Vashi was being transported to Sanpada car shed but ended up destroying all the points on the tracks that allow the trains to change tracks parallely according to its alignment.
“All the four points that are between Vashi and Sanpada were destroyed when the empty local train that was being sent to the car shed at Sanpada ran over them, because of which all our trains towards Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) and Panvel were affected,” said an official, on the condition of anonymity.
Angered by the delay in services and the constant failure by railway officials, commuters on the Harbour line came down on the railway tracks at Panvel and Nerul as even the shuttle services between CST to Vashi and Vashi to Panvel were running at a gap of almost 30 minutes at first and then 15 to 20 minutes later. Commuter Bhakti Bhandari (25), who lives at Nerul and travels to Sanapada for her job in a KPO, said that she was stuck for more than an hour.
“I couldn’t catch the train that had come because it was just too crowded and with women almost falling out of the door. The railways has been asking people not to travel on the footboard but it has not been able to handle the situation when there is a problem. It seems it does not have a contingency plan for the Harbour line,” she said.
As a result of the delays, commuters staged rail-roko at Panvel as well as Nerul as a sign of protest against the mismanagement of the railways. Commuters at Panvel held up shuttle services from 9.10 am to 9.35 am while commuters at Nerul staged a rail-roko from Nerul from 9.45 am to 9.55 am.
