Train carrying farmers to Kolhapur rerouted to Raj, Rlys says

A 1,500-strong group of farmers from Maharashtra has claimed that their train from Delhi to Kolhapur was wrongly rerouted to Rajasthan, but the Railways denied any negligence and said special trains do not have pre-defined routes and the passengers will reach their destination safely.
The Full Tariff Rate (FTR) special train was booked by Lok Sabha MP Raju Shetty's Swabhimani Shetkari Sangathana, a farmers group, to ferry them from Kolhapur to Delhi and back.
The coaching notification, a copy of which is with PTI, was made on November 16 by the Railways with halts at Karad, Miraj and Manmad in Maharashtra according to the demands of the farmer's group.

Manik Kadam, a member of the group and currently on board the train, claimed the Railways took a wrong route and left them stranded in Madhya Pradesh's Banmore station near Gwalior.
"The route - to and fro- was given to us in writing by the Railways and on the return journey they changed it. We saw that the train was in Banmore in Gwalior which was not part of the route given to us when we raised the issue," he told PTI.
Railways in a statement said that these special trains are run through a route which is conveniently available to the railway operation and the route is not predefined.

The idea of such trains is just to take passengers from end point to end point with halts at specific stations requested by the organisers, officials said.

Earlier, when this train came from Kolhapur to Delhi, it took Western Railway route which went via Nagda, Kota, Ratlam, Mathura, as it was the best route available from operation point of view at that point of time, said Railway spokesperson Anil Saxena.
He also said that in the return journey from Delhi to Kolhapur on yesterday, the railway administration found that the best path available is the Central Railway route i.e. via Mathura, Gwalior, Jhansi, Bhopal, Itarsi. Hence, they decided to run this special train from Delhi to Kolhapur via this Central Railway route (which in any way is the natural route for these destinations).

"In these trains there are no predefined routes but only a specific destination. In both the journeys the train only stopped at the three halts requested by the group. The passengers might have felt confused because of the different route used in their return journey.
"They in any way had no reason to worry as it was to reach their destination comfortably. There was no negligence, there was no diversion, there was no unnecessary running of the train, there was no case of wrong signal," Saxena sought to clarify.
The train was held up for some time at Banmore station near Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh because of path congestion problem, the railways said.

"Once, the path became clear, the train moved ahead smoothly towards its destination viz. Manmad, Karad, Miraj and Kolhapur," a statement from the national transporter said.
Kadam said he had no idea when the train is going to reach Kolhapur, but Railways said that it should reach by tomorrow morning.