Avishek G Dastidar

In narrow gauge in India, the rails are 2 feet, 6 inches apart, requiring engines, coaches, machinery and maintenance apparatus that are different from the rest of the broad gauge network, whose rails are 5 ft, 6 inches apart.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has expressed his desire to open up all posts of the rank of Additional Secretary and upwards in Indian Railways to all eight railway services, virtually abolishing cadre posts.

Currently around 2.5 lakh railway employees use official mobile phones, and the expense towards that is around Rs 180 crore per year.

On the new irctc.co.in, a user does not require log-in credentials to search for trains, doing away with a major barrier for smooth user experience.

Earlier this year, arch rivals BSP and SP joined hands to wrest Adityanath’s bastion Gorakhpur and UP Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya’s Phoolpur from the BJP.

The Congress, Narendra Modi said, had no faith in democracy and constitutional institutions, referring to the move to bring an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India.

Chairman Railway Board Ashwani Lohani ordered that the steam locomotives, which are in working condition after their restoration, be used for commercial runs for public awareness on railway heritage.

"There is a lobby of Leftists and anti-Hindutwavadis organisations that do not like the BJP-RSS. Their biggest capital is to create fear among the Muslims, the Scheduled Tribes and the Dalits about the BJP," said Union Minister Nitin Gadkari in an interview with the Indian Express.

Nitin Gadkari said that subsidising retail prices of petrol and diesel would take money away from irrigation schemes, the Ujwala scheme of free LPG to villages, the rural electrification process, the Mudra scheme of loans, and others.

Nitin Gadkari said the BJP will fight 2019 on the development plank, and that cleaning the Ganga is his topmost priority in the last year of the government's term.

Sadananda Gowda was replaced within six months by Suresh Prabhu to turn around the Railways, but the next three years saw little perceptible change in the service.

In a new policy, the Railways has decided to open its doors to any idea or concept from the public that promises more generation of non-fare revenue.

The government is assessing if the 15-week foundation course for new recruits at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) can be turned into a scoring exercise and if the service and cadre can be allocated based on their “performance” there.

In the five working days that each group will spend in Germany, they will see DB’s operations, engineering and human resource management. This is something the Railways have never done before. So, why Germany and DB?

The batch of 239 soon-to-be officers from various railway services is currently at the National Academy of Indian Railways, Vadodara.

Informally termed the ‘buy your own wagon’ policy, it allows Indian Railway clients, both in government as well as private sector, to purchase wagons from the market to rid themselves of any wagon shortfall.

To give the project a fillip, the Indian Railways has also adopted a novel “1+1” policy - for every bench an MP sponsors at a station in their constituency, the Railways will install another bench at the same station and display MP’s name on it as the benefactor.

Of the 3,479 unmanned level crossings in Indian Railways, 479 see very little train movement, around one or two a day. It has been decided that train drivers will slow down at these crossings and ensure there is no vehicular movement before passing.

The UGC has already assessed the infrastructure preparedness on the ground, sources in Vadodara told The Indian Express.