Indian Railways will run 102 special trains for the Dussehra-Diwali travel rush, with bookings for an initial batch opening September 27 through IRCTC, reservation centres and the RailOne app.

Running a separate ‘0’ series of trains, with its own surcharge structure and no concessions, rather than simply adding capacity to regular services, reflects how differently festival-season demand behaves compared to routine travel.

The surcharge itself functions as a rough form of demand management: charging more during the highest-demand period is a way of both funding the additional services and, to some extent, moderating how quickly seats are booked out.

The choice of routes, heavily weighted toward long-distance connections from Mumbai to eastern and southern India, points to the specific migration pattern festivals like Dussehra and Diwali produce: workers travelling from major cities back to hometowns across the country.

For a rail network of India’s scale, the annual recurrence of this exact pattern, and the need for a dedicated special-train system to handle it, says as much about the scale of internal migration for work as it does about railway logistics.

Many of the festival trains depart from Mumbai’s Lokmanya Tilak Terminus and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.

Destinations covered include Mau, Chennai, Bengaluru, Gorakhpur, Kolhapur, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur and Varanasi.

The special trains will operate through October and November 2026, covering the peak festival travel period.

Indian Railways typically adds special trains each year to manage the surge in demand during Dussehra and Diwali.

Passengers are advised to book early given the high demand typically seen during the festival season.

Special trains are in addition to Indian Railways’ regular scheduled services on these routes.

The festival season is traditionally one of the busiest travel periods on the Indian Railways network each year.

Waitlisted tickets are common on popular festival routes given the high demand during this period.

Railway station platform (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0