NEW DELHI, MAY 23: When Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the entire Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) brass were trying to placate an angry Mamata Banerjee over seat-sharing in the Bengal civic polls on Saturday, an entire train of angry, fretting passengers had to pay the price. The Guwahati-bound Rajdhani Express (Train no 2424) was delayed by over an hour because Mamata, who is the Railway Minister, was to travel to Jalpaiguri in North Bengal.So during the time the BJP's emissaries were going up and down to appease the Trinamool Congress supremo and her own partymen were consulting her and when she finally met the Prime Minister and it was officially declared that the NDA Government had survived yet another crisis, the train was "delayed".While Railway staff confirmed that the delay was owing to "VIP movement" on the route, the official reason logged for the delay was a normal routine "complete check-up of the train". As a result, the protocol battalion of the Railways sweated it out at the New Delhi Railway station.But that it not the end of the story. "Being late is not new for the Guwahati Rajdhani Express, it is among half-a-dozen other trains which have been identified as `chronic late-running' trains," says a ministry source. "And once it is late, it normally runs 18 to 20 hours late as the track on which it travels is a tight one and getting passage on it at other than the scheduled time is very difficult, especially in the UP and Bihar sectors which are extremely saturated with rail traffic," he added.But not so when the Railway Minister was travelling on it. Railway staff in the entire sector - from New Delhi to Mamata's North Delhi destination - worked overtime, probably rescheduling other trains, so that the Guwahati Rajdhani may get priority.Thanks to their efforts, for once the train reached its destination on time - both at Jalpaiguri and Guwahati.
