Chennai IAF air show: Southern Railway adds to misery, no extra services provided

CHENNAI: The Southern Railway (SR) on Sunday contributed substantially to make life miserable for the lakhs of people who descended on Marina beach to witness the air show, which, some reports said, entered the Limca Book of Records for crowd turnout for an air show.

Railway authorities, who eagerly augment train frequency and extend operating time of EMUs to address the needs of a less than 50,000-capacity for IPL matches, deemed it fit to operate local trains at the usual Sunday frequency for an event that recorded a footfall of 15 lakh people.

As anxious Chennaiites visited MRTS and suburban stations to board the trains, hoping to avoid the traffic on near-paralysed arterial roads of the city, to reach the Marina, they found trains ‘missing’. Even images of a jam-packed platform on Velachery station going viral on social media, and chaotic roads, did not wake up the wisdom of the railway authorities who took several hours to augment the frequency, and that too only on the Beach-Tambaram segment, while commuters on the Velachery-Chintadripet corridor were left sweating and fuming.

MRTS section trains are operated at a frequency of 20 minutes every day. On an eventful Sunday, when the whole of Chennai converged on the Marina beach, the Chennai Railway Division maintained less frequency of services. In Chintadripet station, where MRTS trains are terminated/originated due to the works of the fourth line project between Chennai Beach and Egmore, there was a mad rush with passengers even struggling to move and breathe, especially senior citizens.

“Trains can be operated on the Velachery-Chintadripet section only every 20 minutes due to the fourth line work. There is no provision to return trains from Chintadripet to the same level as Beach station. Volume of MRTS section was reduced from 150 services per day to around 85 after the commencement of the fourth line works. So, nothing could be done on the MRTS section,” said a spokesperson of SR.

However, railway officials had no excuse to cite for why they considered it sufficient to operate EMUs on Beach-Tambaram and other sections on Sunday pattern, where the frequency was increased only hours after the suburban stations were overwhelmed by the crowd turnout to choking proportions. Asked why they did not plan an increase in frequency on non-MRTS sections, officials’ silence was the only answer.