Mumbai Suburban Railway
Indian railway operating commuter rail lines in Mumbai and surrounding suburban cities
The Mumbai Suburban Railway (colloquially called local trains or simply locals) consists of exclusive inner suburban railway lines, augmented by commuter rail on main lines serving outlying suburbs to serve the Mumbai Metropolitan Region in India. Spread over 450 kilometres (280 mi), the suburban railway operates 2,342 train services and carries more than 7.5 million commuters daily.
The daily commuters constitute around 40% of the daily commuters of Indian Railways. By annual ridership (2.64 billion), the Mumbai Suburban Railway is one of the busiest commuter rail systems in the world.
History
The Mumbai Suburban Railway is the first passenger railway built by the British East India Company, and it is also the oldest railway system in Asia. The first train was run by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (1849-1951) (now Central Railway) between Bori Bunder (demolished and rebuilt as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and Thane, a distance of 34 km (21 mi), on 16 April 1853, at 15:35. The 14-coach train took 57 minutes to complete the 34 km journey, with a halt at Sion to refill the train's water tanks.
The next major service was initiated between Virar and Bombay Backbay by the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway (now Western Railway) on 12 April 1867. Colaba was also added as a station on this route in 1873, and remained the southern terminus for about 57 years, before being shut down on New Year's Eve in 1930. On 3 February 1925, the first EMU (Electrical Multiple Unit) service was initiated from Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) to Coorla Harbour (now Kurla) on the Central line, which was run on 1.5 kV DC traction.
The public source identifies “Mumbai Suburban Railway” as indian railway operating commuter rail lines in Mumbai and surrounding suburban cities. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mumbai, Suburban and Railway.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3273422. VIAF identifies the subject as 143338477. The Library of Congress control number is no00035077. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1849, 1951, 1853 and 1867.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mumbai Suburban Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.