KARACHI, 18 February 2006 — The historic Thar Express, also called the Khokhropar-Munabao train, left Karachi Cantt Station yesterday for Monabao. The train will pass through Hyderabad, Mirpur Khas and Zero Point and will arrive in Monabao in India at 30 minutes past noon today. It is expected to return to Karachi at two tomorrow afternoon.
Over 320 passengers are traveling in the brand new train that has seven cars. They boarded the train after immigration and customs clearance.
The Railways have set up temporary counters at Zero Point. Senior officials of the Pakistan Railways and the Sindh government attended the departure ceremony. The Thar Express, as it is called, will operate every Saturday. Pakistan will operate the train for the first six months of the year and India for the remainder.
A long-running train service already exists between Attari in India and the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. It was suspended from 2002 to 2004 because of Indo-Pakistani tensions.
But Lahore is hundreds of kilometers to the north, too far away and too expensive to reach for many of the thousands of divided families living in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh and the port city of Karachi. Most of the millions of Muslims who fled India for Pakistan after independence from Britain in 1947 migrated to those regions and they have been looking forward to return trips since then. “People had no option but to travel through Lahore. But we expect that 70 percent of traffic would divert to the Thar Express now,” said Ghulam Rasool, station master at Mirpurkhas, the last stop on the Pakistani side.
The train’s journey begins on the Arabian Sea coast in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, and stretches some 400 km northeast through scrubland and desert to Munabao in India. Almost a third of the track — from Pakistan’s Mirpurkhas to Munabao — was abandoned after the 1965 war and Pakistani railroad authorities have embarked on a lightning plan to replace it.
