Railways to put Neral-Matheran toy train service back on track; trial run today

History will be revived at Matheran — the closest hill station for Mumbaikars — as the steam engine will be chugging back on track. The Central Railway (CR) will conduct its first trial for operating the steam engine, on April 11 on the Neral-Matheran stretch.

On April 10, CR authorities went for one final inspection of the steam engine before deciding to go ahead with this trial run. “We will be conducting a trial run of the steam engine on April 11,” confirmed SK Jain, Divisional Railway Manager (Mumbai), Central Railway.

On March 30, CR authorities ran additional services on the 21 km-long Neral-Matheran and 3 km-long Aman Lodge-Matheran stretches. This is a step towards an attempt to strengthen this 111-year-old toy train. There are 21 services on Fridays, 22 services on Saturdays and Sundays and 17 services on Mondays on the 3-km-long Aman Lodge-Matheran section. During weekdays, between Tuesday and Thursday, there will be 14 services on the above route.

Thereafter, the CR carried out various works such as replacing tracks, building crash barriers and walls on curves to prevent the train from derailing and falling in gorges, lifted tracks that had got buried in the red soil and other works totalling over Rs 11 crore.

In January, CR authorities began running two services on the entire Neral-Matheran stretch. In October 2017, they revived the toy train route by running the service on the Aman Lodge-Matheran route, after it was shut inMay 2016 following two derailments.

Sources said that before reviving this rail, they took help from the 115-year-old Kalka-Shimla world heritage rail where toy trains operate on a 96-km-long route. CR authorities are eyeing to achieve the world heritage tag for the Neral-Matheran rail too.

By Shashank Rao, DNA