The northern railways has decided to cease weekend services of the Ring Rail due to low number of passengers. The decision, which will be brought into effect from February 5, has been taken after it was observed that the trains virtually run empty on weekends. However, the entire exercise would be reviewed after three months during which the impact of the cessation of the weekend services would be reviewed.
The train services that will not run on Saturdays and Sundays are Nizamuddin-New Delhi-Patel Nagar-Nizamuddin service, New Delhi-Nizamuddin-Shakur Basti and Shakur Basti-Nizamuddin.
Though the number of services to be stopped does not seem to be high in number, the exercise bears testimony to the fact that the Ring Rail, which is part of the larger sub-urban railway network, is not finding any takers, particularly in the wake of arrival of the Delhi Metro services.
According to a railway spokesperson, the ridership on Ring Rail is not very high during the week days too. But on weekends, the situation becomes worse. “Many a times, it has been observed that the number of people in the train could virtually be counted on fingers,” said the spokesperson, adding that it was causing operational losses to the railways.
The ridership on the large sub-urban railways, ferrying people to and from various national capital region and those to districts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, is still high.
The Ring Rail network, which was started using the rail network laid out for goods trains in the city in the 1970s, has been facing problems in terms of acceptance due to various factors. Commuters say that many stations were located far away from the residential hubs. Also, not many people seemed to be aware of the service.
At one point, there was a even talk that the DTC would provide feeder bus service to the stations but the plan could not be implemented.