Aqua Line to restart from tomorrow
NOIDA: The Noida Metro Rail Corporation (NMRC) on Monday said that it will resume operations on its Aqua Line from June 9 as the partial Covid curfew has been lifted. However, the metro services will be available only on weekdays from 7am to 8pm, officials said.
They said the NMRC is making necessary preparations at all of its stations and on trains as well, so as to ensure that passengers follow social distancing norms and other Covid-19 protocols. The services were suspended on May 1 in light of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“As the weekend curfew is still in place, trains will not be operated on weekends,” said Ritu Maheshwari, managing director, NMRC.
Passenger screening teams will be deployed at each station to check the temperature of commuters and to ensure that they follow Covid guidelines such as wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing. The parking facility will be available at Sector 51 station only, they added.
The NMRC has also tweaked the frequency of trains during peak and non-peak hours. During peak hours (8am to 11am and 5pm to 8pm), the trains will be available at 15-minute intervals (as against 7.30 minutes on normal days) and during nonpeak hours, the frequency will be 30 minutes (which was 10 minutes earlier ). Earlier, train services used to be available from 6am to 10pm.
The NMRC in a statement said it would continue to run fast trains once the service resumes on Wednesday. Of the 21 stations on the Aqua Line, trains during peak hours skip a total of 10 stations which usually have lower ridership. This move is aimed at reducing travel time between Noida and Greater Noida by nine minutes.
Meanwhile, NMRC on Monday issued a tender to hire a developer for the Aqua Line’s extension to Greater Noida West -- 9.6km route from Sector 51 station to Sector 2 in Greater Noida West.
VV Reddy, deputy general manager, NMRC, said the elevated extension will have five stations – Sector 122 and Sector 123 in Noida, and Sector 4, Ecotech 12 and Sector 2 in Greater Noida West.
“The NMRC had issued three tenders earlier, but we did not get suitable applicants. We have made some changes in the tender documents to attract more applicants/developers,” Reddy said.