The latest news, from the Indian railways, they plan to introduce as Side middle berth.
Till now there were only two side berths in all train, now to rake in more profits this is the new, retarded idea of the Indian railways.
Wonder where they are going to make the 3rd passenger sit in the day time.
Really ridiculous, I heard this rumour on a forum, and after checking around, I got some information that I appeared to be reliable.
The coach which has gone for rebuilding is from the Garib Rath(the poor mans carriage)
Well the Garib Raths run as fast as the Rajdhani but are priced at 1/3rd the price of normal trains.
The news is that the coaches are being fully redesigned to make it more spacier.
What is still a mystery, is where the 3rd person will be seated.
There are rumours that the Garib Rath are not making a substantial profit hence the addition, also some say it is not the money, rather that IR want more people to benefit of this cheap rates.
I just hope they do not extend this idea to normal trains. The side lower berth was a personal favourite with me.
Due to some unknown reason my co-passenger would just go up to his berth(I think mostly in evening trains). So I had the entire place to my self.
Otherwise in the normal berths you had to wait till they went up.
Also in the side berth you can bring down your side of the seat and put your legs up and relax
This will all be lost if the SMB comes in. I hope it is limited to just the Garib Rath.
Even if so , I think its really unfair,(unless they are really making it spacious and longer with 3 seats maybe) just becuase it is a "poor mans" train you do not make it uncomfortable.
Lets hope for the best
EDIT
after reading the comments I did a little more research and got some official word---Fitting of SMBs had been stopped. The existing ones will be removed in a phased manner.
So thats good news.
But I never came across this post on MS when the news was fresh, thought that as we MS the leading consumer forum in India are not bothered about SMB, that does not sound good :-P So posted this
