Railway to introduce more trains for north-east links

Agartala, Oct 28 (IANS) Three new trains will be introduced from November 12 to link important cities in the mountainous north-eastern region, a Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) official said on Friday.

Three weekly trains will run between Guwahati and Silchar (383 km), Guwahati and Agartala (577 km) and Dibrugarh and Agartala (721 km) in view of huge public demand," NFR Chief Public Relations Officer Pranav Jyoti Sharma said.

The new trains will initially run for four months, and thereafter their frequency would depend on public response.

Currently, train services are available in more than 25 cities in north-eastern region, including Guwahati, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Tezpur, Jorhat, Dhubri, Tinsukia, Shibsagar, New Bongaigaon, Hojai, Lumding, Maibang, New Haflong, Diphu, Badarpur, Karimganj (all in Assam), Agartala and Dharmanagar (Tripura), Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), Mendipathar (Meghalaya), Dimapur (Nagaland), Jiribam (Manipur) and Bhairabi (Mizoram).

The NFR is now working to connect the remaining capital cities of the north-eastern states by 2020.

Another NFR spokesman said a proposal to roll out ‘Kaziranga Express’ in Assam is also under consideration.

Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain, a member of Lok Sabha from Assam’s Nowgong, mooted the train proposal on the lines of ‘Tiger Express’ launched in June for Bandhavgarh and Kanha National Parks in Madhya Pradesh.

The Kaziranga National Park is a World Heritage Site known to host 70 per cent of the world’s one-horned rhinos, apart from a large number of tigers, elephants, wild water buffaloes and swamp deer.