The Indian Railways will run 80 new special trains from September 12 and reservations for these trains are scheduled to start from September 10. In addition, the Railways will be monitoring all the trains that are currently in operation to determine which trains have a long waiting list, Railway Board Chairman V K Yadav said on Saturday

"Eighty new special trains or 40 pair of trains will start operations from September 12. Reservations will begin from September 10. This will run in addition to the 230 trains already in operation," Yadav added.

"Wherever there is a demand for a particular train, wherever the waiting list is long, we will run a clone train ahead of the actual train, so that passengers can travel," the railway board chairman said.

The railways will also run trains whenever there is demand from states for exams or other similar purposes, he noted.

Meanwhile, the Railways is also going to start computer-based tests for notified vacancies from 15th December 2020, Yadav said. Railway Recruitment Boards (RRBs) had notified 1.40 lakh vacancies for NTPC categories, Level-1 Posts and isolated and miscellaneous categories.

The governmental entity had notified three types of vacancies -- 35,208 for non-technical popular categories (NTPC) like guards, office clerks, commercial clerks; 1,663 for Isolated & Ministerial categories (Steno & Teaches); and 1,03,769 for Level 1 vacancies (track maintainers and pointsman).

"We invited applications for recruitment in various categories for 1,40,640 posts. These were notified in the pre-COVID period. Scrutiny of these applications was completed, but due to COVID-19 pandemic a computer-based examination could not be completed," he added.

(With agency inputs)