26 day-train round trips gone in October: SWR's Dasara-season cancellation angers coastal travellers

South Western Railway has handed coastal Karnataka's festival travellers an October shock. According to a report in The Hindu on October 4, the railway will cancel 26 round trips of the Bengaluru–Mangaluru/Karwar day trains during October — sparing only a single week of the peak Dasara season. The announcement has upset passengers across the coast. Mysuru Dasara is Karnataka's grandest festival, and this is the season when lakhs of students and workers in Bengaluru return home to Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada. For them, the day trains are the affordable backbone of festival travel. The corridor via Hassan is one of the busiest passenger routes in the state, and berths vanish within hours of booking opening. Festival season is also when private bus fares multiply and flight prices soar beyond reach. Cancelling 26 round trips across the month pushes travellers straight into the arms of private operators, passenger associations say. Sparing the peak week is some relief — but Dasara travel is not a one-week event; people travel for weeks before and after the festival. The ghat corridor has a long record of maintenance-driven shutdowns. Electrification work on the Sakleshpur–Subrahmanya Road ghat section has previously kept day trains off the tracks for weeks at a stretch. Nobody disputes that maintenance is necessary. What the timing reveals is a planning culture in which passengers come last: the year's biggest travel season chosen for the year's biggest disruption. Passenger associations want the railway to run festival specials and add coaches to the trains that will run, arguing that one spared week cannot absorb a month of festival travel. So far there is no clear announcement of alternatives — special trains, augmented coaches — to absorb the rush. As Dasara approaches, travellers are left with one question: is the railway ready for the festival, or must the festival get ready for the railway?