Door almost shut on closed-door Mumbai locals

The plan to have Automatic Sliding Doors (ASD) on Mumbai Local Trainsas come a cropper. After almost two years of being in the incubation stage, officials have now admitted on record that the project has not moved an inch.

Speaking to dna, Central Railway (CR) general manager SK Sood said, "It (the project) is not going anywhere." When contacted, AK Agarwal, general manager of Chennai-based Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai, the manufacturing unit that builds Mumbai's local trains, also gave a similar response.

In December 2010, the project to build 72Bombardier trains was started after a global tendering process. For a long time now, city-based railway officials have been saying that legal complications have come in the way of fitting ASDs to these locals, which ICF will manufacture over the next couple of years. Three of the trains have already come in to the city

A sizable number of railway officials said getting the remaining 69 Bombardier rakes fitted with ASDs will delay the project further, as it would require extensive design changes. "As of now, the only local that will have ASDs will be the BHEL air-conditioned trains. There is no plan, as yet for, any other local," said ICF's Agarwal.

He told dna there was no plan to fit these doors even to the factory's Medha local, which is the first train whose electrical systems are completely indigenous, being provided by Hyderabad-based firm Medha Servodrive.

Fatal figures

Around 700 people die after falling off local trains every year

A local train has a capacity to seat nearly 1,167 people

During the normal hours of the day, the general consensus is that for every person sitting, there would be two standing, making it a total of 2,334 people standing

During peak hours on certain routes, the number of people standing can go up to 3,500

During the Super Dense Crush Load hours, it can go up to 4,500

The number of commuters continues to rise at a rate of around 3 per cent on Western Railway (WR) line, which carries 35 lakh people and CR line, which carries 41 lakh

The rate of rise of commuter number on the Harbour line is a whopping 9 per cent