NEW DELHI, OCT 1: At 11 a.m. tomorrow, when the new Shatabdi Express from New Delhi to Amritsar is flagged off, there will be hundreds of passengers who will be forced to cool their heels, change their travel plans.For, the new Shatabdi has been put together, literally, by robbing coaches from existing trains. Not just coaches, even technical personnel have been rounded up from other divisions ``to tide over the immediate crisis''.The new Shatabdi Express will be put together from coaches of the Dehradun Shatabdi, Chandigarh-Kalka Mail and another train which runs between New Delhi and Amritsar. They are now being detached and are on their way to Delhi to be part of the new train. The Railway Administration is going to arrange seven AC chair cars and one coach for executive class for this train by taking them from old Shatabdi trains.Railway booking records show that all seats on the trains which have been cannibalised were booked. Given the coming festival season, the rush has increased - there are over 100 passengers in the waiting lists for both the Kalka Mail and the Dehradun Express. They now stand little chance to get a confirmed ticket, as the Dehradun Shatabdi Express and the Kalka Mail will run with less coaches from tomorrow.The hasty decision to run the new train has put the Railway staff in a quandary, as there were no ``extra'' coaches available for the new train. Left with no option, the Administration ``summoned'' coaches from other trains.In fact, Union Railway Minister Ram Vilas Paswan decided to go ahead with the new train at a time when the Railways was reeling under a shortage of coaches. The Railway Board, which held a meeting on September 28, recorded in its minutes that there is an acute shortage of coaches for the Shatabdi trains. ``On an average, 6.5 AC coaches are detached due to `sick marking' (damaged coaches which are sent to the workshop) from the rakes of Shatabdi every day,'' says the minutes of the meeting.The Railway Board ordered that ``temporary assistance of two AC chair car coaches and two power cars could be given to the Northern Railway'', which is supposed to arrange infrastructure for the new train. Also, the Board agreed to temporarily transfer three new AC chair car coaches from Kapurthala and two power cars from Western Railway to the Northern Railway for two months ``to tide over the immediate crisis.''The Railway Ministry also ran short of staff in its Electrical and Mechanical wings for the maintenance of the high-speed Shatabdi. Since ``filling up these vacancies through selections/promotions is a long-drawn process'', Northern Railway's General Manager S P Mehta is learnt to have summoned 30 Railway technical officials from Bikaner, Lucknow and other places to New Delhi station tomorrow as a temporary arrangement for maintaining the new Shatabdi, which will run six days a week. While Paswan is all set to flag off a newly `assembled' Shatabdi train tomorrow, the Northern Railway Offices' Association will be present in full strength at the New Delhi Railway Station to protest.
