In 2007-08, Indian Railways (IR) carried 6.5 billion passengers (highest in the world as a single system, and second highest in the world as a country after Japan at 9.0 billion passengers), serviced 770 billion passenger kms (second highest in the world, close to China at 773 billion passenger kms) and passenger earnings were Rs 19,783 crores. Of this, 43% of the passengers, 84% of the passenger kms and 92% earnings were from the non suburban sector.

The actual passenger kms for 2007-08 was higher than the capacity of the IR. Such overuse can be reduced by increasing the coaching stock, or by improving the utilization of coaches. The former method proves to be an expensive one for IR. Hence, this calls for an improvement in the coaching stock utilization.

In this paper, we assess the utilization of coaches on the parameters % of runtime, kms/day, and average speed of rakes servicing express/mails and passenger trains in the South Central Railway (SCR), taking into consideration the rake linking involved. This is done by analyzing every rake link used in the SCR as given in their rake link booklet.