New Delhi, Dec 24 (UNI) The operations on the Delhi Metro network on Thursday stepped into adulthood, as DMRC completed 18 years of commencing passenger operations since the year 2002.
On December 24, 2002, operations on the 8.4-km-long Shahdara – Tis Hazari section was flagged off and passenger services were started from the next day.
Since then, the Delhi Metro has emerged as one of the fastest growing Metro networks in the world, both in terms of ridership as well as network length. In fact, with a network of 390 km spanning 11 lines, the Delhi Metro is today among the largest Metro networks anywhere in the world.
The expansion of the network has also been among the fastest in the world, as more than 380 km of new lines have been added since 2002.
During the pre-COVID times, about 65 lakh journeys were being performed on weekdays on the Delhi Metro, making it the mass transportation backbone of the National Capital Region (NCR).
'Today, about 350 train sets operate on the Delhi Metro system for 18 hours a day and perform more than 5,000 trips across the 285 stations on the network, maintaining a consistent punctuality of over 99.9 per cent.
'The impeccable punctuality rate of the Delhi Metro has remained consistent ever since the commencement of operations and has not been dented by the massive expansion in the scale of operations,' a DMRC spokesperson said.
Having set high benchmarks in construction as well as operations, DMRC is now working on developing indigenous technologies in line with the Government's 'Make in India' initiative and 'Atma Nirbhar Bharat' by indigenous development of many systems/ sub-systems of Metro.
In March, the services of the Delhi Metro were halted for the first time ever to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This crisis was turned into an opportunity by DMRC's Operations and Maintenance team as a number of important maintenance and overhaul activities were taken up and completed, which otherwise would have been difficult to execute when the services were operational.
The HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems of the trains were cleaned to ensure consistent cooling. In addition, large scale renovation work was executed on the Dilshad Garden – Rithala Red Line corridor, as it is DMRC's oldest corridor.
Subsequently, from September 7, the services were resumed in a graded manner, following all Covid protocols.
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