Season's first drizzle continues to affect Central Railway services for 2nd day

Technical failures marred the Central Railway (CR) train services on Wednesday, May 25th, after the first drizzle that Mumbai experienced and the repercussions were felt even on Thursday.

But the CR authorities denied that the train services were hit because of the rains and blamed it on a glitch. Until Thursday evening the CR had cancelled more than 120 train services due to the technical fault.

The authorities claim that there was a failure of Auxiliary Transformer at Vikhroli and between Sion and Kurla on the Main line.

"The wires inside the Auxiliary Transformer had burned down and so it was getting difficult to repair it quickly. Normally the life of these transformers are 25 years but problem in this transformer surfaced within 2 years. Now we have initiated an inquiry and if need comes will black list the manufacturer," said SK Sood, General Manager, CR.

Sources in CR said that this transformer is meant to ‘step down' the load from 25000 volt to minimum that is required for lighting the signals. The suburban services were disrupted from 8.11pm on May 25 to 12.05am on May 26. In fact sources said that the two lines of 5th and 6th meant for catering long distance trains was rectified only by 5am.

Due to this the long distance trains were running late by 2-3 hours all till Thursday morning and also the local train services were affected. The officials claimed that the motormen and drivers who were supposed to resume trains from their shifts were stranded at railway stations and couldn't reach their respective stations from where trains were to start. This led to delays in local train services as well since morning on Thursday.