NEW DELHI: To deal with the upcoming Chhath rush, the railways is using real-time heat-mapping of 35 major stations to monitor heavy passenger movement, rushing standby unreserved trains close to these stations to clear the surge of travellers and creating holding areas for crowd control. These measures are based on passenger data from the festive seasons of the past two years, including this Diwali.In a massive operation, the national transporter is set to run around 13,000 special services before and after the biggest festival of Bihar — nearly double than the number of trains operated last year — to ferry an estimated more than 2.5 crore passengers, similar to the population of Australia.Special trains are in addition to normal trains that the railways operates. Most of these trains are headed for poll-bound Bihar.The number of special trains was determined through analysis of past two years of data, which was fed into a model to assess the demand for each destination, railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. He added that micro monitoring is being done at three levels — divisional, zonal and at the Railway Board.Sources said that freight services on identified routes have been minimised to clear the rush and even Dedicated Freight Corridors are being used. Vaishnaw said on Oct 19 (a day before Diwali), there was a sudden surge of passengers at the Udhna station in Gujarat. “As soon as this started showing on the heat map, passengers were put in queue and a standby unreserved train in the vicinity was moved to clear the traffic build up,” he added. Officials said two special trains were operated from Udhna to Jayanagar in Bihar on that day to clear the rush.There was a similar situation at Ambala in Haryana on Tuesday and the railways followed suit to deal with the situation. “We have three categories — normal traffic, crowded situations and overcrowding. Once there are signs of overcrowding, the entire system moves swiftly to deal with the situation,” Vaishnaw said. He added that learning from earlier experiences, the railways increased the number of destinations in Bihar from 7-8 in 2024 to 28. “We identified the closest station for the convenience of passengers,” the minister said.Vaishnaw also said that the railways has issued orders for construction of permanent holding areas at 76 high footfall railway stations such as Mumbai, Howrah, Lucknow, Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, and Patna, and Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Tirupati, and Ujjain, among others.
