Will the Railways or the state government take up the task of providing Bangalore with a commuter rail system? A status check.
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Excerpts from the article
CRS is a state government subject, says Akhil Agarwal, Divisional Railway Manager (DRM), South Western Railways (SWR). “We (Railways) are for long distance trains. CRS is for traveling within the city. This is under state government jurisdiction”. Citizen Matters spoke to officials in the state government’s Infrastructure Development Department (IDD) who say “the Indian Railways (IR) do not do CRS because they feel it’ll be a loss like in Bombay. We wrote a letter to the SWR in February 2009 offering to fund the cost of two rakes. One for Yeshwanthpur to Electronic City, via Hebbal, Lingarajapuram and Byappanahalli. And another from Bangalore City to Devanahalli, via Cantonment, Channasandra and Yelahanka”. The official explains, on the condition of anonymity, that the cost of each rake is Rs. 4.76 crores and that the IR asked them for Rs. 9.5 crores, for two rakes. “We wrote a letter saying they should start the work within a week of their acceptance. IR is yet to respond”, adds the official.
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Vaishnavi Vittal
Citizen Matters
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Comments
Commuter rail - a reality!! -repeat post- plz remove
If a tabloid can be believed -
Bangaloreans could soon board a local train, a la Mumbaikar, to commute in the city. The Railways plans to introduce Mainline Electric Multiple Unit (MEMU) train services like those in Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai.
http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?page=article§id=10&contentid=20091110200911100013358283b599b85§xslt=
Good article
I think pussy-footing around making this a full fledged CRS is going to be detrimental in the long run. Permanant CRS services like metro will help plan feeder metro/light rail lines. It will also enable investment in upgraded signaling, stations and other infrastructure. For example between Hebbal and Banaswadi there can be atleast 3 more stops.
IR is yet to respond
This is one key reason. Suggestion is to have an SPV to manage CRS operationally with reps from SWR, IR, BMRC, GoK on the board.
Yeah, perhaps if this isnt
Yeah, perhaps if this isnt implemented in a proper way it will also go the way of HOHO. They should clearly advertise it and introduce convinient link trains with little waiting period at Yeswantpur and Bangalore City, which seem to be the hubs. I, for one, would be quite happy to use this instead of driving every time I go to work.
Also, Jnanabharathi is not on the listed proposed stops - its a fairly important stop as students of BU would use it.
Ramesh