Chennai: Southern Railway Wednesday announced the
introduction of 16 new trains, including two Duronto services,
in its new Time Table coming into effect from Thursday.
Besides the bi-weekly Duronto expresses between Chennai
and Coimbatore and Ernakulam and Lokmanya Tilak terminus
(Mumbai), nine other long distance trains and five passenger
services form part of the Time Table, unveiled by Southern
Railway General Manager Deepak Krishan here.
Other new trains are Chennai-Haldia Express,
Chennai-New Jalpaiguri, Puducherry-Katpadi, Nagercoil-Bangalore
and Tiruchirapalli-Mangalore (all weekly), Coimbatore-Tirupati
(tri-weekly), Madurai-Tirupati and Ernakulam-Pune (bi-weekly)
and Kozhikode-Thiruvnanthapuram (five days a week).
The date of launch of these trains would be notified later.
Krishan said the guage conversion work on
Thiruvananthapuram-Tenkasi, Dindigul-Palani and
Palakkad-Pollachi lines would be completed by March 2011.
The proposed doubling works in the region would be
completed by this year end, he said, adding work on the new
lines from Nagore to Karaikal and Nagapattinam to Vailankanni
would be completed very soon.
He aid the Southern Railway had also proposed to construct
about 100 road-over-bridges across the region. "This year we
will complete at least 40 bridges," he said.
On the commercial front, he said Railways had planned to
rent out spaces in all stations in the region for the purpose
of advertisements.
In 2009-10, Southern Railways operated 2,230 special
trains compared to 2,070 in the previous year, which resulted
in 13 per cent increase in revenues.
PTI
