Railways on the home run: How the transporter is ferrying 10 mn workers

Ferrying migrant workers back to their states would be the largest special service by any railway network in the world in one go. Here's how the transporter manages it

Seven days into the first lockdown, the Indian Railways (IR) decided to run a lot of trains — but without a single passenger on board. These were the trains or rakes (of 24 coaches each), to use the ministry’s term, that were caught outside their home bases when the lockdown was announced.

In retrospect, this was a fortuitous decision. “When the government de­cided to run the Shramik Specials, many zones would have been caught wrong-footed, without train sets to pick up the migrant wo­rkers,” a former IR official pointed out.

The expected ferrying of an over 10 million workers will