Metro Railway will increase the number of trains and extend the timings from Monday in response to increasing passenger count.

“From October 12, there will be 146 trains daily from Monday to Saturday. The interval between two trains will be around eight minutes in rush hours,” said a Metro official.

The carrier now runs 122 trains daily from Monday to Saturday.

“The last trains will leave Dum Dum and New Garia at 8.30pm, instead of 8pm,” the official said. The last train will leave Noapara at 8.25pm from Monday.

When the services resumed on September 14, the number of daily trains was 110 and Sunday services were suspended.

The Sunday train count will also go up to 64, instead of 58, from October 18. The first and last trains will leave the terminal stations at 10.10am and 8.30pm.

The Sunday services, which resumed on October 4, see the last train leaving the terminal stations at 7.30pm now.

Before the pandemic, the carrier used to run 288 trains every day from Monday to Saturday and carried over 600,000 passengers. For the first few days since the resumption of services, the Metro passenger count hovered around 20,000.

Tunnel one leg finished

One leg of the East-West Metro tunnel between Esplanade and Sealdah was completed by a boring machine on Friday evening. Engineers and workers broke into applause as soon as the machine — Urvi — broke open the diaphragm wall inside the upcoming underground Sealdah station around 4.30pm.

Two boring machines had started moving from Esplanade towards Sealdah in early 2019 but work had to be stopped after buildings in Bowbazar subsided when one of the machines hit an aquifer in August 2019.

Urvi will now make a U-turn and burrow the other tunnel from the opposite end till Bowbazar.