No special trains; passengers forced to cancel their tickets and drop plans

PUNE: As the summer vacation has started, citizens have already booked their tickets to go to other cities like Himachal, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir to enjoy their holidays. 

Many people from North Indian cities like Lucknow, Patna, Gorakhpur go to their hometowns to spend time with family. There are thousands of passengers, who have booked their railway tickets four months ago. Several tickets were confirmed while many have been forced to cancel their plans as their tickets were not confirmed.

Every summer, the Railways runs special trains, mostly for North India, but this time not a single train is running for Patna, Gorakhpur, Lucknow and Darbhanga. There are even no summer holiday trains for Delhi. Dharmendra Kumar booked his ticket from Pune to Darbhanga four months ago and the ticket was in waitlist 34 till his travel date of May 8.

“I had booked my ticket in sleeper class from Pune to Patna but it was not confirmed till the day of the journey. I cancelled my tickets and re-booked through Tatkal but did not get a confirmed ticket. I have dropped my plans and will go in June now. The Railways should run special trains during summer. Every year, they run special trains but this year, they have not bothered to run a single train up to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction (Mugalsarai),” said Dharmendra.

“We have extra rakes, which can be run as special trains. We know there is a requirement for another train, but the authority had not given us permission to run it. During the summer, it is necessary to run a special train but this time, we could not do so,” said a source from the Pune railway division.

THE SITUATION
From the past one week, passengers to different destinations were travelling on tickets that were not confirmed. The sleeper coaches are full of passengers. Every year, the Railways runs three to four special trains to clear the extra rush. This year, the waiting list had crossed up to 700 in the sleeper and in the air-condition coach it, crossed up to 100.