A statistic has revealed that over the last few days, the railways have witnessed increased cancellations for long-distance journeys and thinning of crowds on Mumbai's locals. A test drive by mid-day saw that during peak hours, around 5.30 pm and 7 pm, the CSMT had less crowd.

While the suburban traffic on Central Railway (CR) is usually around 4.65 million passengers per day, the numbers saw a significant dip to 4.46 million in February 2020 (the month Coronavirus impacted India) and till March 10, the average passenger count went down to 4.22 million per day.

As per official data, there has been a stark rise in cancellation of long-distance train journey tickets. During March 4 and March 11, 2019, about 73,661 passengers had booked tickets while 10,635 cancellations reported. This year, during the same period, 66,980 passengers booked tickets and 14,587 were cancelled.

While the thinning of crowds on suburban trains has been noticed for the past two days, railway officials said that it will not immediately reflect in daily ticket statistics as over 80 per cent suburban passengers use season tickets. Hence, the average sale of suburban tickets on Western Railway's (WR) Mumbai suburban railway does not show an immediate change though it dipped from 7,5,0828 on March 9 to 5,2,7342 on March 10 due to a holiday on Holi. But it rose again to 7,78,282.

There has been about 18 per cent rise in cancellation of tickets of outstation trains on WR as compared to last year. Ticket bookings for the vacation season witnessed cancellations, with over 2,000 on Mumbai-Delhi Rajdhani Express alone.

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