In a relief to passengers planning to travel in the coming days, the Indian Railways on Wednesday, 7 October, announced that the Railway Board has given its approval to run 39 pairs of additional special trains in various zones.
The Railways is currently running around 200 special trains due to the restricted services in view of the COVID-19 crisis. The dates of commencement of these trains will be decided by the different zonal railways.
These trains include air conditioned services with sleeper accommodation like the Lokmanya Tilak-Haridwar special train, the Lokmanya Tilak-Lucknow special express train, and the Ajni-Pune special express train. The frequency of these trains spans from weekly to daily.
Among the 39 pairs of trains will also be trains with air conditioned services with seating accommodation including the Shatabdi trains between Bengaluru-Chennai, Mumbai Central-Ahmedabad, and Delhi-Amritsar, the Vande Bharat train between New Delhi-Katra and some double-decker trains.
The Railways had suspended the operations of all passenger, mail and express trains from 25 March as the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed but started operating Shramik Special trains for migrant labourers from 1 May and 15 pairs of Special Air Conditioned trains from 12 May. Subsequently, 100 pairs of train services started on 1 June, followed by 80 more trains from 1 September and 40 pairs of clone trains from 12 September.
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