Festival bounty: SWR trains speed up

Hubballi: The South Western Railway has expedited the speed of 55 trains.
Now passengers travelling by night trains to Hubballi, Bengaluru and Mangaluru and other cities, can reach their destination half an hour early.
A Bagalkot-Mysuru passenger could save over two hours.
The South West Railway has speeded up trains by a total of 30 hours, thanks to line doubling, electrification and other advancements.
Sanjeev Kishore, the general manager of South West Railway in Hubballi, said the utility wanted to improve mobility by eliminating bottlenecks and timely execution of projects. “Measures have been taken to expedite and complete doubling on major routes of SWR. By flattening curves, permanent speed restrictions have been removed. This has helped in raising sectional speed over SWR,” he said.
“It was decided at the Indian Railway Time Table Conference in Bengaluru last month to speed up trains,” he said.
Aneesh Hede, the chief public relations officer of South West Railway, said the decision was to speed up 55 trains to provide a better travel experience. “Intense supervision and daily monitoring by senior officers such as GM, principal chief operations manager HS Verma, have helped minimise failures and match timing. Corrective measures are in place to improve train running also. In the last financial year, till date SWR had been in the fourth position in terms of punctuality all over Indian Railways. Train number 17308 Bagalkot-Mysuru is a major beneficiary of the initiative as it was speeded up by 145 minutes end-to-end. The second big beneficiary is train number 11301, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Mumbai - KSR Bengaluru Udyan Express, which has speeded up by 110 minutes and it will bring passengers of the Kalaburagi region in a shorter time,” he said.
The total time saved for the 55 trains is 1,795 minutes, he said.
Mahendra Singhi, the member of the Zonal Railway Users Consultative Committee, said that speeding up trains was the result of the technical upgrade of the railways. “SWR’s decision of speeding up 55 trains is beneficial for north, coastal and south Karnataka and even other states, wherever SWR runs trains,” he said.
Many trains \being run majorly in Karnataka like train number 16546 Karatagi-Yesvantpur have been speeded up by 70 minutes. Train number 7392 SSS Hubballi-KSR Bengaluru and 16596 Karwar-KSR Bengaluru have been speeded up by 45 minutes.
Train number 16228 Talguppa-Mysuru (40 minutes), 16589 KSR Bengaluru-Miraj, 12725 KSR Bengaluru-Dharwad, 17326 Mysuru-Belagavi, 06485 Mangaluru Central-Kabaka Puttur (all by 35 minutes).
Many other trains, run in Karnataka and other states, are speeded up by 30 to 5 minutes.