Days following beginning driverless services on the Magenta Line, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has announced that the 59 km extended Pink Line is anticipated to have driverless operations by the mid of 2021. Prime Minister Narendra Modi lately inaugurated driverless services of metro train on the 37 km extended Magenta Line (Janakpuri West – Botanical Garden).
“After driverless operations on Magenta Line, metro trains to driverless on another major corridor. The Pink Line is expected to have driverless operations by next year,” DMRC wrote on microblogging web-site Twitter. India’s initially driverless metro train was inaugurated on December 28.
Once operational, the total length of the driverless network of Delhi Metro will improve to about 94 kilometres. This will be about nine per cent of the whole driverless metro network. The whole network of Delhi Metro is about 390 kilometres. There are a total of 11 corridors with 285 stations.
With the beginning of driverless metro services on the Magenta Line, DMRC has joined the list of elite metro rail networks that have driverless operation facilities. At the moment, DMRC is delivering driverless services among Janakpuri West and the Botanical Garden stretch of the Magenta Line.
For the uninitiated, DMRC began industrial metro services in the year 2002. At that moment, the operations started with just six stations and covered the location of about 8.2-km among Shahdra and Tis Hazari. In virtually two decades, the network of the Delhi Metro has grown to about 390 km with 285 stations across 11 corridors.
The year 2020 was the most difficult for DMRC as trains remained halted for months following the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc in Delhi. The services stay suspended for 169 days in a stretch to curb the outbreak of the coronavirus. It resumed only following the recommendations issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs in September 2020.