Direction and volume of passenger flow in trains towards Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka indicate that members of migrant community may be returning to their places of work as the lockdown lifts and work-places open.

For running more trains, the Railways is keeping a close watch on the demand for trains, status of spread of Covid-19 and is in conversation with State governments. “Very soon we are going to announce the running of (few) more trains. It’s a very difficult situation,” Railway Board Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav said in a web-conference here today.

Private trains

Normal resumption of regular trains is nowhere in sight as Indian Railways will run some more special trains based on the demand of routes, which it will announce. The Indian Railways will invite qualifying bids for running private trains in July first week. “It may not be possible to run all the trains (that were run pre-Covid-19 prompted lockdown) in the near future,” he added.

In close to two months -- from May 1 to June 25, the Railways had run 4,594 Shramik Special trains moving 62.8 lakh passengers to their homes. Running of these trains, which the Railways started after a gap of over one month since April 25 when it shut its commercial passenger operations, are likely to be over.

Two Shramik Specials are being run on Friday, the demand is fully satisfied and there is no pending demand, according to the Railways presentation.

For the Shramik Special trains, the top sending States were Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Karnataka. The top receiving States were Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand, according to Railways data. No Shramik Special trains are being run in the returning direction as migrants returning to their work space are using the special trains to travel, added the Chairman.

The Railways expects the freight loading to be more this year against last year, with national transporter running trains at twice the speed. It also used the empty tracks to complete several infrastructure safety works.

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