The Dedicated Freight Corridors project will help in “predictive maintenance” in which trains can be repaired and maintained before they are about to fail which will, in turn, increase the efficiency of the system, said Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in Ahmedabad Thursday. He also expressed satisfaction in the progress of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project. He also announced that the Ekta Nagar Heritage Train, which was running only on Sundays, will now run two days a week owing to its “good response” from the people. The Railways will be testing out new routes for the Heritage train, he added. “The time needed to reach from one place to another has now reduced by 50-70 per cent after the introduction of the freight corridors. After the cargo trains have been shifted to the freight corridors, passenger trains have stuck to their conventional routes. This has given more capacity to passenger trains,” the Minister explained as he visited the Chandkheda office of Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India, which has a train management system displaying active freight corridors over a huge 1,000-km section. Vaishnaw said the freight corridors project is an ambitious project to increase logistics efficiency and decrease logistics costs in our country.
