Mumbai, Dec 24: The Central Railway and Western Railway has not announced a mega/jumbo block for December 24, Sunday. The mega block is carried out for the maintenance works of rail racks and other related works under both the Railway zones. In a bid to avoid the inconvenience to the passengers, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) releases the schedule of changes in the operations of the local trains which says that there is no mega block on the Central Line and Harbour Line today however, a block is expected to be carried out at night on the Western Line for maintenance work .
The Western Railway announced that on December 24 there will be no jumbo block. However, to carry out maintenance work of tracks, signaling and overhead equipments, a block of three hours each will be undertaken from 23.45 hrs to 02.45 hrs on UP Fast line and from 01.30 hrs to 04.30 hrs on DOWN Fast line between Vasai Road and Vaitarna stations during midnight of 22nd and 23rd December, 2017. During the block all UP and Down Mail/Express trains will be delayed by 15 minutes.
On December 22, it was announced that the Central Railway will carry out a four-day long mega block till December 25 owing to which the local train services on Harbour Line will be disrupted as the Central Railway. During the mega block, local trains between Nerul and Panvel on Harbour Line will be suspended.
On the Harbour line, local train services will be affected between 10 am to roughly 4 pm during the mega block announced on Friday. Earlier it was reported that the mega block will see partial or limited services between December 22-24 and the 13-hour long blanket block on Christmas Day. The Harbour line is expected to remain shut from the morning to about 4:30 pm on the last day of the major exercise.
Around 210 train services will be cancelled between December 22 to 25, while 100 special trains will be run. Normally, there are about 81 trains that start from Belapur, but for these four days, only 67 will be run. The Central Railway will run extra 100 local trains from Vashi, Panvel and Mankhurd to normalise the effect of the mega block.