Freight trains will follow a time table

With Railways losing freight to road sector in a big way in the recent years, Union minister Suresh Prabhu sought to reverse the trend in the Rail Budget (2016-17).

He stated that the Railways would come up with time table for freight trains on a pilot basis to ensure they reach their destinations on time, besides stating their speed will be doubled.

Mr Prabhu, while listing the challenge of losing the freight share, proposed three solutions to reverse the trend of declining modal share of freight trains — expanding the freight basket of Indian Railways, rationalising the tariff structure, and building terminal capacity.

Incidentally, the freight basket of Indian Railways is dominated by 10 bulk commodities which enjoy a share of around 88 per cent.

The Railways should look beyond these to expand revenue base, added Mr Prabhu.

“A full-fledged market study is being undertaken and detailed supply and demand scenarios, service level and infrastructure requirements will be assessed so that an action plan to re-capture that traffic through either containerisation or new delivery models, Roll-on Roll-off, will be developed and implemented,” he said, while adding that network capacity limitations do not allow for running of time-tabled freight trains but from this year a timetabled freight container, parcel and special commodity trains will be started on a pilot basis.

He also said that the Container sector would be opened to all traffic barring coal and speci- fied mineral ores and part-loads would be permitted during the nonpeak season.

All existing terminals/sheds would be granted access to container traffic, where considered feasible, he said.

Mr Prabhu also proposed setting up a dedicated freight terminal at Chennai for the automobile sector, besides pinpointing officials to deal with the freight operators.