Vande Bharats to get a bullet boost
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Homemade bullet trains may belt down specialised railway corridors in the not-too-distant-future.
According to two people aware of developments, the Centre is mulling an upgradation of its existing semi-high-speed Vande Bharat trains to high-speed status for the next round of its bullet train project. These trains could be used in future corridors of the bullet train project or even used on the existing Railway network, the first person quoted above said on condition of anonymity.
“Following the success of Vande Bharat, under the ‘Make in India’ initiative, Indian Railways has now taken up designing and manufacturing of high-speed train sets," the second person cited above said, adding that Integrated Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai, and BEML are collaborating to design and manufacture these train sets, which will have a design speed of 280 kmph. Currently, Vande Bharat trains have a maximum speed of 180 kmph.
“The manufacturing cost of this is around ₹28 crore per car (excluding taxes), which is highly competitive compared with other high-speed train sets and almost half the price of Japanese rolling stock that may be used for the MAHSR project," the second person said, also wishing to remain anonymous. MAHSR refers to the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail, India’s first bullet train corridor being developed by the National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd (NHSRCL).
A joint venture between the government of India and the state governments of Gujarat and Maharashtra, NHSRCL has also identified seven other HSR corridors. DPRs (detailed project reports) for four of these seven HSR corridors—Delhi-Varanasi, Delhi-Ahmedabad, Nagpur-Mumbai, and Mumbai-Hyderabad—were submitted to the Railway
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