Piyush Goyal invites filmmakers to promote cinema on trains

Minister of Railways and Commerce Piyush Goyal has lauded the novel idea of Indian Railways to invite filmmakers to promote their cinema projects on trains. The minister has also invited more filmmakers to use the medium of railways to reach out to the masses, using its 'Promotion of Wheels' scheme. Goyal tweeted his message on social media on October 16.

Goyal tweeted –"I encourage more filmmakers to use this route to reach out to the masses."

On October 16, the team of the upcoming comedy 'Housefull 4' became the first Bollywood film to travel from Mumbai to Delhi in a special promotional train called Housefull 4 Express.

The stars of the film – Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Bobby Deol, Kriti Sanon, Kriti Kharbanda and Pooja Hegde – were accompanied by the film's crew including producer Sajid Nadiadwala.

They arrived on New Delhi Railway Station, in the morning of October 17.

The actors were highly ecstatic with this promotional journey and expressed their joy and enthusiasm through their twitter handles. Akshay Kumar tweeted, "It's a Housefull of smiles as the #"Housefull Express journey kickstarts!"

Fox Star India also expressed their happiness on being part of this trains maiden journey.

This train on its journey to New Delhi also had halts at Surat and Kota stations wherein it garnered adequate publicity amongst the movie fans.

Railways have approached many major production houses with upcoming films to use these FTR (Full Tariff Rates) trains to facilitate Pan-India publicity and promotions of films across the length and breadth of the country.

These production houses have the liberty to come up with their new ideas or travel routes, as per their requirements, to promote their films along with their star cast and crew. Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is the modal agency for handling such trains.

IRCTC will undertake attractive and thematic Vinyl Wrapping of these promotional trains, keeping in view that the trains will be criss-crossing across the country and sure shot publicity and wide mileage would benefit both the production houses and bring laurels to Indian Railways as a mass publicity vehicle. This initiative thus would be a win-win situation for both the production houses and the Indian Railways. Many big production houses have started showing their interest in this new mode of promoting their films after the success of the special journey for Housefull 4.