Now, India shooting for home-made bullet trains
New Delhi: India has begun work on a home-built bullet train that will exceed 250 kilometres per hour (kmph), a top government official told ET. The official said it will be faster than any of the trains now running on the Indian Railways.
«It is being built on the Vande Bharat platform that can already clock a maximum speed of 220 kmph,» the official said.
The designs are being prepared at the Indian Railways' Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai.
Globally, high-speed trains are those that ply at over 250 kmph such as the French TGV and the Japanese Shinkansen.
India is relying on Japanese technology for the bullet trains that will run on the line between Ahmedabad to Mumbai that's being built. The Shinkansen E5 series bullet trains, which India will deploy on this route, can hit 320 kmph.
The focus till now has been on improving the speed of Indian Railways trains, according to the official cited above. «The (proposed) variant Vande Bharat trains can now reach from zero to 100 kmph in 52 seconds while the existing bullet trains do this in 54 seconds,» he said.
ICF builds the indigenously developed Vande Bharat trains. The made-in-India bullet trains will run on the north, south, east corridors that were recently announced. «The new corridors will be using more Indian tech and domestic manufacturing,» the official said.
These will complement the western corridor that was developed with Japanese collaboration and technology. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is providing a soft loan of
