Travel blues: Metro ops hit on 1st Mon of new year
Times of India | 6 January 2026
Kolkata: Commuters woke up to a metro disruption on the first Monday of the New Year, as a snag hit operations for an hour from 7.38 am.
Students and office workers required to travel the length of the city (from the southern fringes to the north) found that the metro was not running between the new terminal, Shahid Khudiram (Briji), and Mahanayak Uttam Kumar (Tollygunge) stations. "Around 7.30 am, I went to Shahid Khudiram station with my son, Arko, only to discover that there was no train. Nobody seemed to know what was wrong or when services would resume. My son and I took an auto to Tollygunge. It was torture boarding a metro from Tollygunge to Netaji Bhavan to get my child to school. The train was so crowded that we somehow found ourselves pushed into the coach," said Monimoy Ghosh, a resident of Patuli on EM Bypass.
Metro Railway issued a statement around 9.40 am saying, "After a brief technical issue, normal services resumed from 8.39 am. In the meantime, truncated services were operated from Mahanayak Uttam Kumar (Tollygunge) to Dakshineswar in both directions."
"Either there is a technical issue or a suicide to halt services for at least an hour on average. Trains come and go without heeding the timetable. Sometimes they are ahead of time; sometimes they are far behind schedule. It is such torture using the Blue Line, especially since the old terminal, Kavi Subhash station, was shut down. Metro Railway then (July, last year) announced that the station would be opened in 9 months. Let alone start work to repair the station. The authorities are yet to build the crossover at the new Shahid Khudiram station to ensure trains arrive on time and do not take the prolonged exercise of going up to the now-shut Kavi Subhash station to switch tracks," said Satadru Hazra, a PWD worker and Kudghat resident.
Adding to the trouble, a train got stuck on the Dakshineswar-bound tracks at Kalighat station around 12.40 pm. It resumed services after 10 minutes, commuters said. The delay had a cascading effect though the non-peak hour prevented crowding of coaches. A Metro spokesperson said, "The train was detained for 7 minutes. It was a temporary technical issue."