More 12-car trains on western line

The Western Railway (WR) plans to augment its services and introduce more 12-coach train services from April 14.

The Western Railway (WR) plans to augment its services and introduce more 12-coach train services from April 14.

Those living at Borivali and Andheri will benefit most from this upgrade. The Western Railway (WR) is also in process of converting four nine-car trains to 12-car that would add 106 services.

The maximum of these services would run on the Churchgate-Borivali stretch with 61 services, followed by between Churchgate-Andheri with 27 services.

The total number of 12-car services would be 1,002 of the total 1,210 services run by the WR. This would also leave them with only five old trains while rest all are violet-white trains.

This would only help in accommodating 1.25 lakh additional commuters on this section, which carries 33 lakh commuters daily.

“The density of passengers per coach has reduced by 17% while the capacity addition in terms of number of coaches has been 27.7% in the last four years,” said Sharat Chandrayan, chief PRO of the WR.

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The number of coaches rose from 528 in December 2009 to 768 coaches in February 2011. In the last four years, the number of passengers has witnessed a growth of 8.02%, while the addition in coaches has created room for 8-lakh commuters per day.

Although there have been an increase in number of coaches and trains, the power consumption has surprisingly gone down. “The WR has saved over Rs40 crore by saving on power consumption from these trains,” said a senior official from Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation that procured the Siemens-make trains on behalf of WR.