Around the world in our indian railways!

It's time to bid farewell to the month of September and with this, i get to know that i have travelled almost a decade in indian railways. A decade back, i started my journey from my home town to college in Singara Chennai.

I tried to calculate how much distance i have travelled in our esteemed indian railways. By any rough measure, in last 10 years, i have travelled almost 80,000 kms on indian railways.

That's going around the earth almost 2 times! Google says, the equatorial distance of earth is 40,000 kms.
To add to this feat, i have travelled the earth almost 2 times only in Sleeper coach of our indian railways (barring one or two times on third ac classes) Around the earth only in Pearl City and Nellai express! I am sure there are lot of people over there who have come around the world more than 2 times!

However looking at the changes in train in last 10 years , there are very few

1) Tatkal tickets scheme brought around the time of NDA government
2)  New berth named "Side Middle" was created between Side upper and Side lower by Lalu. But it was discarded later
3) One or two plug points per coach and water bottle holders.
4) Ticket prices has risen by almost 40 %

Other than that, there have been literally no changes in sleeper coaches. Even train schedules have not changed much and no more additional trains were run. Getting ticket on any day is still an achievement on south-bound trains and you are The Chosen One like harry potter  if you get tatkal ticket on weekends.

There is no double lane route beyond chengalpattu even though work is going on for decades. You would be shocked to know that for every 15 mins from 19:00 to 22:00 , indian railways operates trains from chennai to trichy-madurai-tirunelveli-kerala route. At any point of time, in midnight , close to 20 trains cross each other back and forth in single-lane manual crossings! 

  I read somewhere the previous NDA government were in favor of privatisation of railways via PPP model. Just like the golden quadrilateral -national highway project which was a revolutionary one (in terms of perfect implementation in a country like ours),it would be glad if the next government brought about changes in railways.