The Railways is planning to do away with brake vans on passenger trains and replace them with special parcel trains on select routes in a bid to reduce stabilising time (time spent by a train at a station) and ease congestion on platforms.
"It takes passengers under 15 minutes to board or disembark a train in a major station. But the parcels in the brake van force the train to spend up to 40 minutes at the platform, which is a waste of both manpower and space. If the brake vans are done away with, the stabilising time would reduce, resulting in better utilisation of station capacity," Railway Board member (traffic) R K Thoopal said.
The brake vans would go out in a phased manner, starting from important mail and passenger trains. However, till a suitable alternative is found, the Railways would continue to carry perishables, newspapers and magazines -- which form a bulk of the goods moved by the passenger trains.
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The Railways spends Rs 1200 crore on the parcel business, but earn just Rs 400 crore from it. Interestingy, half of the damage claims on the Railways also come from the parcel service. The Railways needs to maintain a large staff to carry out loading and unloading. The platform space also gets cluttered with parcels lying around, especially in larger stations.
"The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways had recommended that the ministry finds an alternative to brake vans on mail and express trains, and we have accepted the suggestion," Thoopal said.
As an experiment, the Railways has already started time-tabled parcel trains on the Chennai-Mumbai and Mumbai-Howrah routes, which would eventually do away with the need for brake vans in all passenger trains. These trains would mainly cater to the end-to-end movement of parcels between key stations and would have a assured delivery time.
The plan is part of the Railways' efforts to better utilise its assets, Thoopal said, adding freeing up line and station capacity would make the Railways a more efficient transporter.