Indian Railways to continue with clone trains post-COVID period; check schedule

New Delhi: Considering the success of the clone trains, Indian Railways has said that it will be running the services of these trains even post COVID period.

Railway Board Chairman has said that the experimentation of running the clone trains have been successful and hence Railways has decided to continue with the operations.

The Railway Board Chairman has said that these clone trains have current occupancy of 72 – 80 percent. Usually clone trains are run on routes where the waiting list tickets are above 150 percent.

Clone trains are duplicate trains on high demand routes. Indian Railways started 40 pairs of new special trains or 'clone' trains from September 21. This was the first time that the Indian Railways’ ran 40 ‘clone’ or duplicate trains on high-demand routes.

Notably, these trains were in addition to the 310 special trains which wer already in operation. These trains were run one or two hours ahead of the departure of already operating special trains. However, the travel time and the stoppages was limited to operational halts.

While the tickets for 19 pairs of these trains was charged at the Humsafar Express rates, it will be at par with the Janshatabdi Express rates for the clone train between Lucknow and Delhi.

According to Indian Railways, 10 trains (5 pairs) were operating between Bihar and Delhi under the East Central Railways. The Northern Railway was running 10 trains (5 pairs) operating between Delhi and Bihar and back, West Bengal to Delhi, Punjab to West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh to Delhi among others.

The South Central Railway was operating two trains between Danapur (Bihar) to Secunderabad and back. The South Western Railway was operating 6 trains (3 pairs) between Goa and Delhi, Karnataka-Bihar and Karnataka-Delhi. The Western Railway was running 10 trains (5 pairs) between Bihar (Darbhanga)-Gujarat (Ahmedabad), Delhi-Gujarat, Bihar (Chhapra) to Gujarat (Surat), Mumbai-Punjab, Gujarat(Ahmedabad)-Bihar (Patna).