Indian Railways announces ‘clone train’ scheme to facilitate travel of waitlisted passengers

As reported earlier, the Indian Railways will be operating 80 more special trains in addition to 230 that are already operational. In addition to this, the railways has now announced a scheme to provide relief to those passengers with waitlisted tickets in routes that witness high passenger traffic. The new clone train scheme launched by the railways will run on those high passenger traffic routes.
Reportedly, the Indian Railways is planning to start these clone trains in a phased manner in the next 15 days, and will be issuing a notification regarding the same.
Referring to this, Railway Board Chairperson VK Yadav while attending a press conference said that wherever there is a demand for a particular train, wherever the waiting list is long, the railways will be running a clone train ahead of the actual train to facilitate travel of passengers. He also added that the railways will be closely monitoring all the trains that are currently in operation to assess which trains have a long waiting list.
Here’s all that you need to know about the clone train scheme:

• The clone train will run as an alternative to the actual one, and will have the same number as the original train. It will operate only if the waitlist passengers of that said train are quite huge in number. Also, the clone trains will be accommodating only waitlisted passengers.
• Those in the waitlist will be informed regarding their berths in the clone train soon after the reservation charts for the original scheduled trains are up, i.e., four hours before the departure.
• Running these clone trains will pose a challenge for the railways, as they would require additional rakes for running. As such, the railways will be running these trains from major cities initially where there are additional rakes.
• As per the latest reports, the clone trains will be primarily 3AC trains, which will be running ahead of the special trains that are already operating.
• This scheme is very much like the Vikalp scheme, wherein those in the waitlist are accommodated in another train on the same route, regardless of booking concession and quota. However, in the Vikalp scheme, the waitlisted passengers may be allotted a nearby boarding and destination station instead of the original boarding and destination stations.