Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation

escalator

With narrow platforms leaving little room for the construction of foot overbridges with wider staircases, the(MRVC) has now turned to France to resolve one of the biggest commuter woes.Given the space constraint, the MRVC is planning to adopt the double discharge design for bridges at various stations. The new design formulates two landings on the platform one above the other thereby distributing the footfall.An official from MRVC explained that the upper landing will be equipped with anwhile the lower landing will have a staircase. “This will ensure that an FOB is equipped with both a staircase as well as an escalator and it’s not that one is replacing the other. And since the staircase and the escalator are not built side by side, very little horizontal space will be occupied.”The new model has already been in use at Mahalaxmi and Mahim stations. Now, it will be replicated at three other stations on Western Railway: Andheri, Nallasopara and Mumbai Central. Officials from MRVC are of the opinion that a double-discharge FOB will help carry double the number of passengers as compared to the capacity of any FOB.However, the model can be implemented only on those bridges that have an upper deck with minimum 10-meter width. The inner staircase has to have connectivity to the upper deck which essentially means that it needs to be wide enough to accommodate it. “While as of now all the double discharge bridges are planned on WR, the concept will also be replicated at other stations on CR where the required width criteria is met,” added another MRVC official.According to a study conducted by the MRVC, about 11.24 lakh commuters use trains services on WR during morning peak hours between 7:30 am and 11am with the Prabhadevi-Dadar section witnessing the highest load of about 1.45 lakh commuters within an hour. This is followed by the Matunga-Dadar and Khar Road-Andheri section which witnesses about 81,844 passengers during evening peak hours.According to officials from MRVC, close to 3,000 passengers may be traversing through a busy station like Andheri at a time during rush hours. And with trains offloading passengers every two minutes, the platforms and bridges are bound to be saturated with passengers.“The idea was to increase the capacity but without having to construct more FOBs. This made it imperative to do so and double-discharge model helps to a great extent,” added the official.Chief PRO for MRVC, Anil Phatke said, “The model is an ideal solution considering the space constraint on platforms. They’ll clear the passenger load at an increased speed as compared to a conventional FOB.”