South Central Railway has a complicated formula to run specials in Hyderabad
Hyderabad: The South Central Railway has earned additional revenues of Rs 53.40 crore from special trains in the last two fiscals i.e., 2014-15 and 2015-16.
Over 10.62 lakh passengers travelled on 1,653 special trains operated by the SCR during this time.
The fare in special trains is more than the normal scheduled trains, and is charged at Tatkal rates. The income from a special train thus would be 20 to 25 per cent more compared to other trains.
The occupancy of all the specials run by SCR in the last couple of years have been 100 per cent. The reason for this cent per cent occupancy is that the special trains are not operated just because of festivals or due to the summer holidays rush.
A lot of study on passenger traffic is done by the Passenger Profile Management cell of the railways before taking a decision to run a special. “The day to day occupancy position of each train is monitored by the PPM cell. The wait-listed position of all the regular trains, direction-wise is monitored on a daily basis.
“If all the trains in a particular direction are in the wait-list for all category of classes, i.e. with more than 300 wait-list in sleeper class alone and also other category of travel class in maximum number of trains in that particular direction, the commercial department will then advise the operating branch to run a special train in that direction,” said SCR official spokesperson M. Umashankar Kumar.
The operating branch, after taking into consideration the availability of stock and engines and path, will plan on running a special train. The railways has also started to inform the wait-listed passengers of a particular direction about special trains being pressed into service on that sector, through SMS alerts, e-mails, Twitter, Facebook and news media.
Officials said the SCR has been running special trains mostly towards Visakhapatnam, Kakinada, Tirupati, Quillon, Patna, Bikaner, Guwahati, Shirdi, Pune and Yeswantpur among other destinations.
The regular scheduled trains per day are: Visakhapatnam (seven trains), Kakinada (one), Tirupati (five), Quillon-Kottayam (one), Patna (one), Pune (three) and Yeswantpur (two).
