Big milestone for Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways! The Western Railway zone of the national transporter recently operated its first double stack dwarf container train between Jamnagar and Sanjaan near the city of Mumbai. The national transporter started the double stack dwarf container or the DSDC as a new delivery model in order to attract new traffic on the network and also to increase the loadability. According to Western Railway, Mumbai, Ludhiana, Secunderabad as well as Ahmedabad are already on the DSDC routes. However, the recent double stack dwarf container van carried between Jamnagar and Sanjaan is the first such freight operation for the Western Railway zone.
A detailed study to open Chennai, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Ahmedabad, Pune and Bengaluru routes are already in progress, which are being taken up by the Central Railways, Northern Railways, South Western Railways and few other railway zones. It is expected that the proposals for opening the routes will be submitted by the railway zones to the Railway Board very soon.RELATED NEWS
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On July 8, 2018, the very first DSDC was operated by a private container train operator from the Reliance Rail Terminal, Kanalus which reached Kribhco Infrastructure Limited, Pali on July 9, 2018.
The Indian Railways network transports around one billion tonnes of goods each year, which is a huge volume to be transported on the operational routes. The freight traffic handled by the Indian Railways network has increased significantly over the past few years. According to a PIB release, the freight traffic has increased by more than 15 folds from nearly 73.02 million tonnes between the years 1950-51 to almost 1106.15 million tonnes in the year 2016-2017.
Moreover, recently, the cost of transporting goods and freight volume in the South Central Railways (SCR) zone significantly decreased with the Indian Railways longest electrified tunnel, which opened in the new broad gauge line between Obulavaripalli and Krishnapatnam. The South Central zone is saving almost Rs 7.5 lakh per coal rake, since the commercial operations on the route for freight transport began in the year 2019.