A year after the announcement was made at the Union budget of 2007-08, the Pune- Nashik passenger train has been cleared and will begin before March 31.

“From our side, we are ready. The train will pass via the Panvel- Karjat route,” said general manager of Central Railways division, Soumya Raghavan, at an interaction with the press today. Until now, the Panvel- Karjat section was sanctioned for goods trains, which had put the brakes on the Pune Nashik passenger. The Commissioner of Railways Safety (CRS) has sanctioned the route to ferry passengers only recently.

Raghavan added that there are plans to increase the rake capacity by October. However, she refused to specify if the Pune station, which runs 17 trains (up) would get additional rakes. Pune division will be able to increase the frequency of trains, once additional rakes are added. Generally, all new rakes are sanctioned to Mumbai.

“We admit the state of affairs,” the Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) D K Jain said when journalists asked about the shrinking capacity of trains to ferry the increasing passenger traffic, poor water facilities at the station, proliferation of hawkers and the malfunctioning escalator.

Jain said it was not possible to increase the number of tracks on the Pune-Lonavla route owing to lack of space. However, he said the AC to DC conversion on the route had been completed. This will help in increasing the capacity of the trains once additional rakes are made available.

He also said that the officials were hard put in their efforts to clear encroachments on railway land on Tadiwala Road. “We have taken steps, but we have not had significant success. These settlements have been there for more than 40 years, it is difficult to remove them,” he said. The division is also in two minds on whether to overhaul the sole malfunctioning elevator at the station. “It is an old elevator that was commissioned in 1997. We are wondering if we should repair it now or wait for the some time as the station is anyway going to be upgraded to world-class status,” Jain said.

Pune is among the 21 stations that have been nominated for world-class status.