Eat-Sleep-Railfanning 🔄 Repeat - Shankar Mehani

IR is not quick to respond to internal or external problems.
nor IR would rethink its policy of having large fleet of coaches on trains.
If IR gets occupancy statistics, they could very well reduce the number of coaches in a train. This will reduce their operating cost and loss. Consumption of Diesel and Electricity can be reduced. The reduced number of coaches in a train will give other benefits : speed can be increased. safety and cleaning and monitoring of coach can be improved. Service to Customers by Vendors too...
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will be better. e.g. giving Food by caterers for 24 coaches is not same as that of 12 coaches or 10 coaches. With reduced coaches, the operating frequency can be increased. and this will in turn attract more passengers. With improved speed whole IR network will become speedier and tracks will not be congested. and delays of Goods traffic can be avoided.

Dear Friend, be it low passenger fares, be it inefficient operation & maintenance practices or be it excess manpower (cost), what ever may be the actual reason(s), the Indian Rly is able to recover about 57% of total cost incurred in passenger services which is causing an annual loss of over Rs. 30,000 crore.
Most convenient & politically correct way (w/o increasing fares) to reduce this loss is to increase the number of coaches in passenger trains. If three trains with combined length of 48/52 coaches are operating on the same route, it would be much more profitable to amalgamate these three trains into two trains and run a profitable freight train on the slot vacated. “ Operating frequency” cannot...
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be reduced by number of coaches in the train, but by reduced number of trains with larger number of coaches.
Longer the train, more the passengers, lesser is operational cost per passenger and more the profit (or lesser the loss). If there is pragmatic study of the current traffic, anticipated future traffic and the existing running train loads, and all the coaches running on the IRly network are suitably amalgamated to form trains of full 24/26 coach length, number of passenger trains shall be reduced significantly without any drop in revenue generation. Substantial line-capacity released shall permit a large number of additional profitable (mostly freight) trains thereby boosting the revenues of IRly. A lot of cost saving by way of reduced loco, staff, power can result in drastic reduction in the losses. Punctuality of trains shall improve.
External problems are there aplenty but are probably ignored. Internal problems gets nurtured due to departmentalism rampant in IRly, political or and other factors. Main problem is lack of strong intentions and will- power to work in unison for the betterment of nation/IRlys. What practically happens are people generally work for their section/ department. Broad vision to work for the nation IRlys is elusive.
IR does have statistics about ticket sales etc., probably this statistics is not properly analysed/utilised and action taken if any is very slow. Today when communication is super fast thanks to mobiles/ computers/ internet; the market scenario has become dynamic, decisions have to be taken fast and conveyed fast to the right destination (esp. special trains). Today organizations akin to leopards can survive and thrive; not the ones like elehant.