If you plan to run 34-odd special trains to ferry your party supporters for a political rally in your home state, it helps if you happen to be the Railway minister.

Ahead of Railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Chetawani Rally in Patna on October 28, his ministry has decided to reduce the hiring charges for special trains operating between October 1, 2007 and March 31, 2008. This six-month period is a classified “Busy Season”.

With the second Busy Season starting on October 1 (the first one is between April 1-June 30), Railways would have started charging Rs 900 per hour per coach as detention charges and 75 per cent of the Full Tariff Rate (FTR) as empty haulage charges on special trains and coaches. Now, the rate is down to Rs 300 and 50 per cent respectively.

Detention charges are for the duration a train is kept and haulage charges are for bringing empty coaches from various places to form a rake. Two days before the hiked charges could be put into force, the ministry came out with a circular on September 28 putting both the hikes on hold with “immediate effect”.

This circular, a copy of which is with The Indian Express, also fixed the rate of detention charges at Rs 300 per hour per coach between October 1 and March 31, 2008. So, if the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had to hire a single 18-coach train and keep it for 24 hours, it would have had to shell out Rs 3.8 lakh as detention charges at Rs 900 per hour per coach. Now, it will only need to pay Rs 1.29 lakh for the same train. Apply these figures to 34 trains and RJD would end up paying a third of what it should have paid otherwise— Rs 44 lakh instead of Rs 1.32 crore.

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