जिंदगी में शादी के अलावा ट्रेन में RAC ही एक ऐसी स्थिति है,जिसमें दो अजनबी साथ निभाने को मजबूर होते है। - Junaid

Had an awsome ride on 17618 Tapovan Express from Lasalgaon to Mumbai CST yesterday.
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Waiting at LS, Pushpak SF passed at 5.20 pm... running 1.5 hours behind schedule. My Tapovan was running late by 20 mins. Soon we caugh up with Pushpak at Igatpuri where the NER crack SF was having its customary BSL WAP4 replaced by KYN WCAM3. I had a feeling we will proceed earlier as we don't have a halt at Kasara and Pushpak needs brakers (locomotives at front for braking while descending the ghats).
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But to my surprise, Pushpak was given the go ahead. But soon we also followed it on the up line (There are 3 tracks between IGP and Kasara.... Up, down and reverse line..... Soon we had a parallel run with Pushpak at the Thull ghats ..... was a memorable incident as we both halted (customary brake checking) and started simultaneously.
Soon, just before Kasara at the last tunnel, Pushpak was detained and we overtook it.
Couple of points regarding this...
1) I assume Pushpak needs brakers being a 24 coacher hence has a stop at Kasara (CR railfans please clarify).... so we were allowed to proceed ahead (we reached CSTM at 10.20 pm while Pushpak reached at 10.40 pm).
2) Though both are non CR trains, it was bit of a weird controlling. Why Pushpak overtook us at MMR (Tapovan had a halt of 30 mins including loco change) if we were to eventually proceed ahead? We could have easily be on time if were not detained at Manmad Jn.
3) My first thought was that if this had happened in NCR, we all would have cursed the controllers. This proves, there are many constraints, parameters, that we railfans don't understand and blindly blame certain zones without actually realizing the nitty grities of section controlling.