Western Line stations

wrestling

Elphinstone Station FoB stampede

suburban stations

commuter

Central Railway

National Rail Users’ Council

From Dec 18, RPF will ask women commuters on fiveto queue up for boarding and alighting from trains, a move that will eventually include all stations and also male commuters.The Railway Protection Force (RPF)-Western Railway have launched an initiative which will not only take theand jostling out of the exercise of boarding a local train, but will also ensure commuters and their belongings remain safe. Starting December 18, women commuters at Bandra, Andheri, Borivali, Bhayandar, and Mira Road stations will be asked to queue up while boarding, and also alighting from the trains.To begin with, the experiment will be restricted to the trains starting from these stations and those ending there, and will be extended to all stations based on the feedback the RPF and the Western Railway (WR) receive. This is a part of several crowd-management steps the railways and the railway police are in the process of putting in place after thein September that took 23 lives.The RPF’s grand plan is to get both women and male commuters to queue up at all its, and is inspired by ainitiative in Bhayandar launched last year.Mumbai Mirror had reported that commuters boarding fast trains from platform number six at Bhayandar, of their own accord, started queuing up. While the practice was started by women boarding the first-class compartment reserved for them, the male commuters soon adopted the process (‘Queue sera sera’, MM, July 1, 2016).The RPF will deploy a total of around 97 women constables to supervise the queues at the five stations from December 18, the WR’s chief security commissioner AK Singh said.“Once the system is in place, we will include other stations and male commuters. During my stint with the, we had formed queues for women commuters at a few stations and it worked very well,” Singh added.A 12-coach Western Line train during peak hours carries around 6,000 passengers against its capacity of around 2,000. Having run out of terms to describe the peak hour rush, the railways coined a new expression a few years ago -- super-dense crush load. What it basically means is 16 people are crammed in just one sq mt of compartment space.Shailesh Goyal, former member of the, said the initiative was indeed conceived by the Bhayandar commuters (queues are still observed at Bhayandar station) and was followed by commuters at Badlapur on the Central Line.“It is heartening to see the railway authorities taking forward a wonderful initiative conceived by the commuters. Now, the RPF has to ensure discipline is maintained and fights don’t break out in the queues,” Goyal said.A senior RPF officer said that the move will ensure women commuters are shielded from chain-snatchers and perverts. “There have been incidents of women being molested while boarding or alighting from trains. The queue system will keep a check on molesters and also keep thieves at bay,” the officer said.