Passenger-unfriendly Cantonment Station

Passenger-unfriendly Cantonment Station
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: While the Railways are on a roll introducing new trains, reforms and technology, the stations in the city suffer from lack of basic amenities.

Take Cantonment Station in the city for example. The station sees a large number of travellers passing through its doors, but the facilities are woefully inadequate.

Getting information about train timings or any other information is a daunting task as there is no enquiry counter at the station. Renovation work is in progress to open reservation counters on the first floor and it even includes separate reservation counter for the physically challenged on the ground floor. But there no plan to open a counter for enquiries.

Getting a platform ticket can be a real challenge at this station. Not a single platform ticket vending machine has been working from January 2007. To make matters worse, there is no separate counter for issuing platform tickets.

Jam-packed long queues for train tickets, make it really worse for people who need to buy just a platform ticket.

Railways offers BSNL and Airtel customers of Bangalore, the choice of buying platform tickets via SMS. Customers using this option, get a five digit number on their SMS, which they can punch in at the vending machines at the station.

If anybody is planning use this service at the Cantonment Station, they will be for a rude shock. There are no platform vending machines for that purpose.

Trains like the weekly Bangalore- Kochuveli pass through Cantonment but is not scheduled for a stop there. This has led to a lot of confusion amongst passengers, who routinely arrive at the station, only to rush to the City Station on finding that they are likely to miss the train.

Railway sources say that the Kochuveli train will stop Cantonment Station from next week as a temporary measure and the next railway time table from July 1 will give four new stops to the train before reaching Salem. They are Cantonment, K R Puram, Bangarpet and Tirupattur.