Indian Railways has decided to operate 40 pairs of trains (80 trains), reservation for which will start from September 10, and the trains will run from September 12.

To accommodate waitlisted passengers, Indian Railways plan to start running “clone trains”, which would be trains that will run on those routes where trains have waitlisted tickets for a week or ten days. Some of these trains that will be subsequently notified will run ahead of the existing trains and may also stop at a lower number of stations. Railway Board Chairman and CEO VK Yadav said this to reporters in a web-based conference on Saturday.

Indian Railways, which had stopped running passenger trains in the last week of March after COVID-19 prompted lockdown re-started passenger services from May 1. It was running 115 pairs of trains.

The set of 80 trains, for which booking will start, include New Delhi-Varanasi Vande Bharat Express. This is different from the Vande Bharat train-sets that the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) used to operate in the pre-lockdown phase. 

Several other inter-state trains will be run on some routes where migrants are heading back to their places of work, added Yadav. Railways is also firming up plans to run metro trains in Kolkata.

Computer-based test for filling up vacancies

Yadav also said that Railways plans to conduct the computer-based test from December 15 for 1.4 lakh vacancies including one lakh vacancies for posts for track maintainers, for which 2.42 crore applications were received. Railways, which is already running trains for NEET exam applicants, in various states now plan to run trains for NDA exam applicants as well. The Computer Based Test (CBT) for the above vacancies had to be deferred due to Covid-19 pandemic and resultant lockdown, which was imposed throughout the country. Scrutiny of the applications had been completed, but the process of further examination had got delayed due to covid related restrictions.

On running a lower number of train post-Covid-19 based on the zero-based time-table, the Chairman and CEO said that a final decision would be taken. The zero-based time-table is being worked out with IIT-Bombay and will allocate time on tracks for passenger trains, freight trains, and maintenance time.

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