Central Railway’s Pune division will run a fortnight of engineering blocks from 19 September to 4 October to commission a third railway line between Hadapsar, Pune Junction and the Ghorpadi coaching maintenance complex. The division has listed 42 trains as fully cancelled and 25 as diverted, with further services short-terminated, regulated en route or rescheduled. The window overlaps most of Ganeshotsav, which begins on 14 September and ends with visarjan on 25 September.

What the block is building

The work is the pre-non-interlocking and non-interlocking stage of a third line on a short but heavily loaded stretch. Hadapsar to Ghorpadi is where Pune’s traffic towards Daund and Solapur meets the empty-rake movements running in and out of the Ghorpadi coach maintenance yard. Until now that has been done on two lines. A single late arrival, or a rake taking longer than planned to clear the yard, has knock-on effects that reach as far as Lonavala in one direction and Daund in the other.

Crews cannot fit non-interlocking work into short night windows. They have to cut over the signalling, the point machines and the interlocking table as one piece, and no train can run through the section while they do it. That is why a project measured in a few kilometres takes fifteen days of the timetable with it.

What it means for people travelling

The heaviest early impact is on the Pune-Hadapsar line, where blocks run daily between noon and 5 pm from 19 to 23 September, according to the schedule circulated by the division. The cancellation list runs through the corridor’s workhorses: the Indrayani and Deccan Expresses on the Pune-Mumbai corridor and the Siddheshwar Express to Solapur, along with Pune-Daund passenger services that function as commuter trains for Uruli, Patas and Kedgaon.

Diversion is a bigger problem than delay. A Pune-Howrah or Pune-Jammu Tawi service routed via Lonavala-Karjat-Panvel-Kalyan, or via Satara-Miraj-Kurduwadi, skips its usual stops. A passenger holding a confirmed ticket for a station no longer on the route has to make separate arrangements. And the Ganapati specials Central Railway has added for the festival run to the Konkan. They do nothing for the Daund and Solapur side of the district, which is where this block bites.

Anyone travelling in this window should check running status on the NTES app or the railway enquiry system on the day of travel rather than relying on the booking-time timetable, and should expect road alternatives on the Pune-Solapur and Pune-Mumbai routes to be busier than usual.

The longer view

Pune division has been adding capacity in pieces for years while demand grew faster than the track under it. The Ghorpadi complex was meant to let more trains originate and terminate at Pune and Hadapsar instead of running through to Mumbai for maintenance. That only works if rakes can move between the yard and the main line without occupying a running line, and that is the job the third line is meant to do.

The test comes after 4 October. If punctuality on the Daund and Solapur sections improves through the winter timetable, a fortnight of cancellations will have bought something. If the constraint simply moves further down the line to Manjari or Loni, residents will be entitled to ask what fifteen days of lost services bought. Also worth watching is whether the division publishes the revised timetable early enough for people to plan around it, or whether the changes surface as they did this time, days before travel.

Sources: Punekar News, HelloRail, The Live Nagpur

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.