Recently I need to travel to Yavatmal from Hyderabad. We were a group of extended family including children & senior citizen grand parent.

We were exploring multiple travel options. We found the following

1. Self drive – Google showed 7.5 hrs travel to Yavatmal by road.
2. Sleeper bus – Starts at around 9pm and reaches by 7am.
3. Train – There is a train station – Sevagram that is at around 75 kms. SC-ngr express (12771) trains mon-wed-fri in night 10 pm and takes around 9 hours. There are more trains but this train was available for our day of travel.

After deliberation, we felt the train to be better option primarily because of the following reason

1. Senior citizen, children may need personal break anytime during the night.
2. Personal break does require climb down/up in bus whereas in train it is comfortable. In fact, during travel my son went on his own for the breaks (in train). I did not have to accompany him.
3. Movement during travel is much easier in the train.
4. Travel air sickness during train travel is comparatively less during train travel.
5. Car travel will have fatigue penalty to pay for the people driving the car and senior citizens.

Having done the trip, I do see train travel was comfortable for the family. It does require booking in advance. Return journey we did not get reservation for everyone & was not as comfortable as onward journey. Further it does cost extra for the car travel between Sevagram & yavatmal.

Recently I had traveled by train from Secunderabad to Sevagram (near Nagpur). I had decided to travel by MMTS local train service from lingampally to Secunderabad station. Cab takes order of hour to 1.5 hr and travel by car is painful during peak traffic hours and also cost you 1.5x to 2x on uber/ola. I thought to experiment with the MMTS local travel.

I looked at the MMTS timings online & ensured to reach in time as I was traveling with family & children. Train was delayed and not on schedule. Since I had kept 1 hour buffer in schedule, it did not cause any issue. Lingampally station has 5 platforms. The train may arrive at platform 1 or 5. We were at platform 5 when the announcement for the train arrival on platform 1 came. Traveling with senior citizens is less viable in such scenarios if they can not climb the skywalks between plafforms comfortably.

Since train starts from Lingampally, we could manage to find the seats for all of us with little push to board as soon as the train arrived on the platform. Train had lot of passengers travelling standing and got reasonable traffic especially from Borabanda, Hitec city stations. It seems to be popularly used transport in this part of the city. Away from pollution, travel did not generate any fatigue. There is congestion during morning hours on the return route (Secunderabad to Lingampally) and train has to wait for signal clearance. It adds couple of minutes on the return journey from Secunderabad to Lingampally. MMTS travel cost you INR 10 per passenger. Lingampally to your destination can cost you depending on your distance starting from INR 150+.

Overall, nice experience. but requires sufficient planned time. Train may not be on schedule. You don’t save much time but do avoid the traffic & road pollution when traveling by MMTS.