Indian Railways achieve 100% punctuality for the first time in history. Moved forward from British era

History is made on 1st July 2020 with railways achieving 100% punctuality rate. Second highest record was made on 23rd June with 99.5% punctuality as just one train arrived late.

Now this is not a small achievement given all the constraints that railways face while running a train on it's designed path and in the given time slot.
The point to be noted is this achievement is made during Covid-19 pandemic. In Pre-Covid times, 13,000 passenger trains and 8,000 freight trains used to run every day. And on 1st July, just 220 passenger trains along with 3,000 loaded freight trains and 2,200 empty ones had run.
Now this is a good sign as the "starting trouble" has been overcome.

Why trains are always late to reach u?

Now why should the trains delay at all? There are mainly two types of issues which the railways face.
1. Internal-  This includes unforseen situations like signalling problems which make trains wait in outskirts. There can be power issues or even track breakdowns.

2. External- Sometimes the trains run over cattle or humans. Some other times it's agitations which become the cause.

Impact of delays

The number of tracks in the Indian Railways are limited due to the huge traffic it has to bear. All the trains have fixed path and time. So the more the no.of trains, more is the congestion of tracks.  Some of the trains running on the same time have to be delayed. The only remaining option is prioritisation. The premium trains, like the Rajdhani are given priority over others.
The passenger trains are given priority over freight trains. This causes the freight trains to get more and more delayed. As a result, the industries don't prefer freight trains (now this is a serious issue).
Another example is of the Golden Quadrilateral. It's capacity is 15% while the traffic here is 60%.

What railways is doing for it?

The Indian railways running on time has been a dream for every living and non-living Indian. Now Covid is the chance, the chance to properly maintain tracks. The last 3-4 years saw huge delay in trains as many of the tracks were under maintenance which India had been waiting for since the time the British left.
Railway spokesperson has revealed that the signalling system has been modernized.

1. Many projects have been started to enhance capacity by building additional lines and modernizing signalling systems.
2. Railways are working on Zero-Based timetable. That means only those trains will be focused where traffic is more and which are cost effective. The trains are being cancelled on routes where the traffic is much less. Also the stations where the ticket sales are less are being skipped.
4. Fright trains are exclusively given the Western corridor to run.

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