TRIP REPORT: DELHI ANAND VIHAR TERMINAL - LUCKNOW JUNCTION BI-WEEKLY AIR-CONDITIONED DOUBLE DECKER SUPERFAST EXPRESS INAUGURAL RUN
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Conventionally speaking, a trip report is only expected once the journey it intends to report sees the end of its timeline. And going on similar principles, if reading the title of this text up here and the system clock down there raises your eyebrows, the not-so-technically-sane explanation to this is that this particular journey isn’t starting on April 26th 2015. It started way back around April 26th 2014 when a rail factory in Punjab, without...
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letting the slightest of spoilers out, rolled off its gateway an untagged, unexplained surprise. The information supplied was only sufficient to brew speculations and knit iffy strands of happiness-cum-excitement in the railfans’ fraternity.
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The names of even the source and destination struggled their way out on a shaky platform for weeks while the men in black pondered upon economics, feasibility conditions and political angles. Once the national and the state capitals made their way under the confirmation stamp by the authorities, deciding one of the two routes hardly took any time given the saturation conditions and notorious punctuality records on one of them eliminating it out. But probably this wasn’t meant to end here. Even though the zonal ownership of the rake cleared all confusions out regarding the decision of terminal at the state capital, a juggle suddenly came to light where possibilities of rake transfer were explored stating unavailability of adequate maintenance facilities. The matter was rudely spurned by the other zone and the NER based train was back to square one.
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And then started an era of expectations, hopes, false promises, baselessly speculative news articles and an endless wait. Almost once in every three days the newspapers had something new to say, something exciting, something hopeful about the train but the life span of such information hardly exceeded a week. From Diwali to Eid to Christmas to Holi, the wait stretched on and on which finally led the spectators to March 21st which strongly looked like ‘D’-‘DD’-‘Day’. What happened thereafter broke the trust and diluted the excitement to an extent as large as possible. News kept on coming in, but there wasn’t anyone to be bothered. It all looked like a hoax now. LJN DD was demeaned to a dream people had started moving on from.
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But sooner than never, it all is getting back in place now. All the broken strands re-unite this afternoon at 14:00 hrs at Anand Vihar Terminal, well hopefully.
The report continues (or starts?) post the journey. Thanks for reading.