Two NE-bound passenger trains to leave Delhi today

The Dibrugarh-New Delhi passenger special train will run from Delhi with effect from today and from Dibrugarh with effect from May 14.

The train will depart from Delhi at 4 pm today and will arrive in Guwahati at 7:50 pm tomorrow and reach Dibrugarh on Thursday. The special train will have stoppages only at Mariani, Dimapur, Lumding, Guwahati, Kokrajhar among others.

In addition, the Agartala-New Delhi passenger train will run from Delhi with effect from May 18 and from Agartala with effect from May 20 with stoppages at Badarpur, Guwahati and Kanpur central stations.

The Indian Railways finally decided to resume passenger train services with effect from today. This comes nearly two months after passenger train services were suspended in view of the coronavirus-induced lockdown.

The Home Ministry issued a standard operating procedure for the movement of people yesterday and made it clear that only asymptomatic and confirmed ticket holders will be allowed to travel.

The passengers will also have to reach the stations 90 minutes in advance to board the trains and must undergo screening at departure.

Moreover, special trains taking lakhs of stranded migrant workers back home during coronavirus lockdown will now run in full capacity. The capacity of passengers in each special train should be equal to the number of sleeper berths on the train.

Meanwhile, booking for reservation in these trains are available only on the IRCTC website. Booking tickets have already started since yesterday evening.

It may be mentioned that only 15 pairs of special trains will run in the first phase from New Delhi to Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna Mumbai, among others.

Thereafter, Indian Railways will start more special trains on new routes based on the available coaches after reserving 20,000 coaches for COVID-19 care centres and adequate number of coaches being reserved to enable operation of up to 300 trains everday as shramik special fro stranded migrants.