The Sport of Rush Hour Train Boarding in Mumbai India

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By: leelefever on March 20, 2006 - 10:04am

 

The trains in Mumbai are famous because they are so completely over taxed, moving more people than any metro system on earth. They have an excellent safety record based on train crashes, but 10-15 people per day die on the tracks. As Wikipedia describes

Mumbai's suburban railway is the densest route in the world. It is approximately a little more than 50,000 passengers per kilometer, transporting 65 lakh (6.5 million) commuters daily. This has resulted in severe overloading in the trains which carry 5000 commuters per 9 car train which are designed to carry less than a third of that amount. The density of passengers in peak hours is as high as 15 people per sq metre.

We went to the busy Dadar station today at rush hour to watch the spectacle, which should not be missed in any visit to Mumbai. The event can best be described as a sport for the men. It takes speed, agility, strength, perseverance and concentration.

 

As the train approaches the station, the men let out a chorus of yells as they gather on the platform. As the train speeds by as it slows, a few jump into the open doors as the crowds push closer to the edge. The men clearly revel in the competition among their peers.

 

When it comes to a stop, it turns into a civilized wrestling match with each man struggling to find some type of toe hold inside the train- some way to pry himself into the car before it leaves. The men are packed together so closely I wonder how they can breathe.

 

With more men than room, the train begins to move and the lucky ones fight tooth and nail to find some way to hold onto the train as it leaves, each with a confident smile, knowing he had won. Some are left to fight for another train.

Incredibly, we saw just one station of many, where the scene will be repeated until the train achieves a level of density that no mere mortal can handle. Athletes indeed.


Post From: Mumbai, IN
By: AG (not verified) on May 3, 2006 - 8:11am
Probably not much worse than catching the 4 or 5 train during rush hour in NYC Wink
By: Chaitanya (not verified) on July 14, 2006 - 4:40am
Dear Leelefever, I am an expat Pune-dweller (the better cousin of Numbai) resident. I work on image anaylsis of time series and self-organizing systems in Germany. I was wondering since you have these wonderful snaps of the mumbai local boarding, if you might have a complete time series, like a movie. I was discussing movement of people/cells/particles with colleagues and decided to work on some modeling. But raw data is harder to come by. And hope you were'nt travelling on the locals when the criminal minds blew up the trains with people 7-times over! Brutes that have warped minds! Your site and pictures are wonderful! Keep it up! Regards, Chaitanya.
By: leelefever on July 18, 2006 - 2:02am

Hi Chaitanya,

I'm sorry that I don't have a more time-series of pics from the train boarding. You are welcome to use the photos I have on Flickr... http://www.flickr.com/photos/leelefever/sets/72057594085291268/

 Thanks for your kind words...


By: Gajendra Pratap Singh (not verified) on July 28, 2006 - 8:46pm
Snaps are horrible
By: Richard H (not verified) on April 1, 2007 - 12:10am
Leelefever wrote: "The trains in Mumbai are...moving more people than any metro system on earth." Well, according to Wikipedia, which you do quote a little later, the Tokyo Metro and the Moscow Metro move more passengers than the Mumbai Suburban Railway. However, the Mumbai Suburban Railway does move more people than any other metro system in the world, including the New York Subway system if Wiki's numbers are accurate. The Mumbai Suburban Railway, however, is NOT a metro system. This is where people get things wrong. It is a suburban commuter railway, like the Long Island Railroad, METRA, or others around the world. It is not a very large one given it's approx. 180 route miles. Los Angeles, California (where I live) has a suburban commuter railway that has over twice the route miles of the Mumbai Suburban Railway but carries less than 1% of the passengers! Your other statement in the same sentence: "famous because they are so completely over taxed", cannot be disputed by anybody. I don't think there is a commuter railroad at all like it anywhere in the world. I don't think there is any railway or railroad, metro or otherwise that has passengers packed in as densely on its trains as that railway does day in and day out. It is carrying probably five times the number of passengers it was designed for. It's safe to say that it should be modernized and expanded. It should be brought up to full Metro standards and passenger capabilities probably increased so that 10 to 12 million a day can be carried. Mumbai is going to need something like that for the future. The commuters deserve it.