The commercial capital if Madhya Prdesh i.e. Indore is suffering a lot due to its poor Rly connectivity with respect to
(1) quality of track (mostly branch line with slow permissible speed),
(2) Rly distance is usually longer than corresponding road distance,
(3) number of trains esp. daily ones are very less.
(4)...
more... a lot of time is lost at outer of station due to poor layout, single line etc, so people prefer road over rail for travel.
The doubling of INDB-Laxmibai nagar is a small step to help alleviate the problem to some extent.
Maximum traffic from Indore is for Bhopal and the traffic is primarily captured by Taxis, buses and pvt. vehicles. These cities deserve to have better interconnection. Few years back, when going from Durg to Indore, I had a ticket upto Indore, reserved up to Bhopal by Chhatisgarh express and onward reservation upto Indore by Malwa express. I was strongly advised by my relatives to switch over to taxi at Bhopal for onward journey to Indore to avoid inconvenience. But I wanted to experience the real difficulty in the train travel. The train practically took more than 6 hrs for about 265 km journey from Bhopal to Indore, stopping now and then practically through out the journey. Taxi would have taken around 3 hours for its (about 170km run).
Going by past working of IR, there is inherent tendency to initiate proposals for capacity augmentation/ new trains etc beginning with zonal/ divisional HQs. Better alternatives involving bigger and commercially more important cities are often overlooked. In such a scenario, not having a divisional HQ, even after being top 15 cities of nation, has lead to negligible Rly development in Indore since decades. The situation has somewhat improving since last few years, thank to efforts made by Indore MP Sumitra tai Mahajan.
Some of the important rail projects which were gathering dust since several years are gradually being taken up.
(1) Ratlam-Indore-Mhow-Khandwa-Akola Guage conversion project. Inspite of being an alternate route for North-South connectivity, the project languished for want of political push where as lesser important ones were getting through.
(2) Indore-Manmad project- Mou between IR, Govt of Maha, Govt of MP finalised for cost sharing of project, final survey is now being taken up. Better options had been suggested in my earlier blog entry no. Re# 1935218-1 dated 20.7.16
(3) Indore-Dhar New line project initiated by MoS Mr Rathwa in 1990s has lost steam even first section taken up is not yet commissioned.
One project that have capacity to propel the level of traffic from Indore Rly Stn is construction of short cut Rly line (about 80-85kms) from Dewas to Sehore or suitable station near it on BPL-UJN route.( blog entry no. Re# 1935218-1 dated 20.7.16 for Mumbai-IND)
(a) IND-BPL distance may come down from 265km(UJN)/225 to about 165 km much like road distance. The fare shall be very strongly in favour of Rlys.
(b) This new line along with doubling of Dewas-Indore (40km) and BPL-Dewas (40km) could facilitate Bhopal-Ind in 2-3 hours which will be good enough to capture majority of traffic between IND-BPL.
(c) Mumbai----(580)IND.830-(+165=745)BPL.835-(+700=144 5) NDLS(1385) shall be a new alternative route between the top 2 megacities of India. The new route shall give shorter connection from Mumbai to west MP/East & central UP to cities like IND/BPL/JLS/CNB/LKO/GKP etc.
There is a lot of untapped traffic potential for IRlys in Indore. This can be very well tapped provide remedial steps are taken to overcome the deficiencies in Rly connectivity.
