Productivity of Railway Stations: Case Study - New Delhi Railway Station

Railway stations, an important component of urban transport infrastructure, remains a lot to be desired in developing countries resulting in their poor productivity. Very little research has been carried out in the field of critically analyzing the causative factors of poor performance of stations in India. Delhi, the national capital of India, has six major railway station terminals besides 29 smaller stations cumulatively handling 1.195 million passengers per day. The present paper is an attempt to assess the performance of the largest railway station of Delhi i.e. New Delhi Railway Station (NDLS), with daily passenger footfall of 0.5 million, as the case study and evolve alternate strategies to improve its productivity. The study reveals that the track-side peripheral areas are most critical in terms of level of service (LOS). The study estimated the utilization levels of all platforms over 24 hours period. Two alternate strategies were proposed and evaluated, namely “staggering of train schedule” & “crowd management” scenarios which result in 8% & 47% improvement in the performance level respectively.