Demotion for a Mumbai Local over the years

                                 Today, let me bring to you the story of a Fast Local which lost out to Mail /Express over the period of time. My memory of this local goes back to when I first started working for Taj around 2005. I don't know if it existed earlier than that in any other form. Those days, I used to live in Thane (TNA) and a new path breaking fast was introduced in the early morning hours.It used to start from Thane and directly came from Kalva Car Shed (KCS) on Pf 4, fill up and leave to CST at 6:10am. The classical stops were Mulund, Ghatkopar(GC), Kurla (CLA), Dadar (DR), Byculla (BY) and finally CST. This local was designed to trail the first UP Fast of the morning from Mulund (MLND).

                                     When it was introduced, there used to be a situation at TNA when Pf 6 & 4 both had fasts towards CST in pre dawn hours. It was unfair to a lot of early morning crowd as this TNA-CST Fast never filled up to the brim as not many commuters could be found for 2 back to back fasts. The saving grace was that the First fast from Karjat (KJT) used to be invariably late on most occasions and some crowd from Pf 6 did spill over into PF4. Remember those were the days of DC Locals and Maximum Permissible Speed (MPS) was 80kmph. The schedule was to use the TNA Pf 4 South End turnout, or the MLND north end turnout and then switch to fast tracks. Since the Mail / Expresses always got precedence, and the KJT - CST Fast had to run behind it, the TNA-CST Fast was always meted a secondary treatment.

                                        

                                   Since Siddheshwar and Vidharbha and many more expresses lined up to use UP fast line,very frequently the TNA-CST fast was given the UP slow line right up to CST. It used to take 45-52 min on most days to reach CST. There have been instances of this fast taking all the turnouts available to switch to Up fast and then back to UP slow. In all those years, I had seen it use TNA south end turnouts,MLND turnouts,Vikhroli (VK) turnouts, Vidyavihar (VVH) turnouts, Matunga (MTN) turnouts, Parel (PR) turnouts and BY turnouts. It was almost impossible to predict which turnout it would take on a day, purely depended on Section Controller.

                                  The next change in Timetable(TT) saw it getting extended to Dombivli (DI) and thus the empty rake came to DI Pf 2 from KCS and it ran slow till MLND and then followed the same halt pattern.Needless to say that again there was no fastness in this. It was just a namesake fast because of the above mentioned reasons. But, more commuters started benefitting as DI to TNA slow stretch got an additional train. Now it was invariably getting to use the VVH turnouts.The death knell struck when Bhandup was added as a halt and VVH crossover was becoming more of a routine from the next TT change.

                               Finally about 3-4 years back the weird fast services on CR started, where trains began running on slow corridor till Ghatkopar (GC) and then started switching to fast track at VVH. This was yet another blow for this fast as it never got an opportunity to cross over at VVH because of incoming Mail/Expresses. Again commuter traffic on this EMU increased as now it was running slow between DI and GC.

                                    In the last Suburban TT, the fast was degraded to a slow and in the present avatar runs as 5:50 DI -CST Slow. It is no more the fast I used but, it continued to be the train I used for daily morning parallel action with M/Es. I changed jobs and now get down at GC, I changed residence to DI, but have persisted with using the same local service over the years.