Question: A courier service has offices at three locations: Jamshedpur, Kharagpur and Howrah. Its employees travel by trains from one location to another for pick-up and delivery. It takes 40 minutes for an employee to travel from any railway station to the nearest office (and another 40 minutes for coming back); the paperwork to deliver the parcel at the respective office takes an additional 10 minutes. Assume employees do not waste any time.
Employees have the option to choose from any trains, whose time table is given in table below. Assume all trains travel on time and there is no time gap between arrival and departure of a train. Further, assume that the employees board the trains as soon as it arrives at the station.
An employee, starting from Howrah station, has to deliver one parcel at Kharagpur office and another parcel at Jamshedpur office. His task starts the moment he boards the train at Howrah station, and gets completed immediately after delivering the second parcel.
Which of the following trains should he board at Kharagpur station to minimize the time required to complete the task?
If the employee boards T202 or T203, he will have to go from Kharagpur to Jamshedpur. After reaching Jamshedpur, he again has to go to Howrah via Kharagpur which will obviously take more time. So, options 3), 4) and 5) can be eliminated. The time taken to complete the task in trains T102 and T103 are: