Snag hits Blue Line services; harrowing time for commuters

New Delhi: Thousands of commuters on Wednesday had a harrowing time owing to technical snags in the Delhi Metro's Blue Line, when trains on the route lost contact with the control centre, first intermittently then completely, resulting at last in total "loss of view" for trains on the entire line. The line that connects Dwarka in west Delhi to Vaishali in Ghaziabad and Noida was hit by signal failure between Karol Bagh and Dwarka first, and later between 3 pm and 3:30 pm on the entire route.

Another technical snag was reported at around 7 pm during the rush hours, which left the stations jam packed and train services were frequently affected for minutes. Though, DMRC official said that train services on Blue line were available at a frequency of 5-8 minutes due to intermittent signalling issue with resurfaced around 7 pm.

Commuters took to social media to report about the service disruption. Ritwik Ranjan tweeted that due to technical snag on "Blue-line" commuters standing from past 30 minutes just to travel three stations from Yamuna Bank to Nirman Vihar." Another commuter tweeted that it's utmost frustrated moments when a metro does not run properly.

Shubra Jain, who uses the Metro to commute from Rajinder Nagar to Noida said, "Metro was running very slow on Blue Line. While it normally takes me 45 minutes to reach office, it took more than two hours. It was infuriating."

"The view and control of the signalling and Automatic Train Control system on Blue Line (Dwarka Sec-21 to Noida City Centre/Vaishali) at Operations Control Centre (OCC) was intermittently getting lost on Wednesday between Karol Bagh and Dwarka section. As a result, trains were being locally controlled as and when such loss happened, resulting into bunching/ hold-up of trains for brief spells," an official from the DMRC said.

"Between 3 pm and 3:30 pm, the loss of view was for the entire Blue Line which created bunching on overall line before being restored again at 3:30 pm," the official added.

The trains during this time took inordinately long halts at stations, according to commuters, even lasting up to 15-20 minutes. The long delay between trains resulted in huge crowded at such stations as Rajiv Chowk, Yamuna Bank and Mandi House, which see a heavy footfall anyway. "Even after an hour, the train moved barely three stations and stopped for several minutes at each station," a commuter, who boarded the Metro from Rajiv Chowk for Noida, said. Finally, the issue was resolved at 4:23 pm and since then trains were reported to be running smoothly, he added.