Central Railway oils the wheels of Matheran tourism
To provide comfortable joy rides, railway has allocated Rs five crore for resuming toy train services
Matheran, the closest and the most popular tourist destination for Mumbaikars, is seeing a revival in its tourism, thanks to the Central Railway. In 2021-22, the CR carried three lakh tourists in their toy trains. The authorities will also complete improvement works on the entire 21-km track before December this year which is expected to further boost tourism.
The railways plan to resume the toy train services by the year-end and had allocated Rs 5 crore in the Union budget of 2022-23 for this purpose. The Central Railway will undertake rehabilitation of a bridge between Neral and Matheran. Simultaneously, they are strengthening the tracks, providing sturdier crash walls and creating a drainage system to prevent flooding during monsoon.
The railways will focus on a culvert of waterways to facilitate the movement of rainwater along with the creation of approach drains and drains alongside the tracks. In order to provide continuous smooth travel, multiple works were undertaken on the railway line; provision of anti-crash barriers, laying of tracks, and strengthening of the existing ones were done.
Further, the CR has also installed a new inter-railway communication system called optical fibre communication for the train services. This has been introduced on the 21-km railway stretch and placed parallel to the tracks to improve the communication network between motorman, guard of the toy train and railway station masters.
With its shuttle services for passengers between Aman Lodge and Matheran, the CR has been instrumental in popularising this place as a major tourist destination. Senior CR officials said that they have ferried 3,06,763 passengers and transported 42,613 packages during the year 2021-2022 with a total of 16 services on weekdays and 20 services on weekends between Aman Lodge and Matheran.
“In addition to providing a comfortable journey to tourists, these services help in cheap and quick transportation of materials also. This has resulted in fetching the revenue of Rs 1.82 crore during the period from April 2021 to March 2022,” stated CR chief PRO, Shivaji Sutar.
The winter vacation is most appropriate season for passengers traveling to Matheran and the month of November, 2021 topped the chart with highest passenger earnings at Rs 27.65 lakh after ferrying 42,021 passengers closely followed by the month December, 2021 that generated passenger earnings of Rs 27.11 lakh and carried 43,500 passengers.