Monday, December 2, 2019

‘Passenger trains to run up to 160 kmph in a few years’

Increasing the speed will take five to 10 years, depending on infrastructure development, says Railway Board Chairman

02/12/2019, , V. GEETANATH,HYDERABAD

Vinod Kumar Yadav

The Indian Railways is poised for a major structural and operational transformation in the next few years, with passenger trains slated to be run at 160 kmph in the Mumbai-Delhi-Kolkata sector and freight trains to be run at 100 kmph.

Towards the South, in the Delhi-Chennai, Kharagpur-Vijayawada sectors, the plan is to run passenger trains up to 130 kmph. Increasing the speed up to 160 kmph will take five to 10 years, depending on infrastructural development, said Railway Board Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav.

‘Run on demand’

“Our vision is to see that trains, passenger and freight, are run on demand in the Mumbai-Delhi-Kolkata sector by upgrading our capacities. We have divided major works into super critical and critical categories, to complete them in the next two to five years,” he said during his recent visit to the city to inaugurate the Financial Management Institute.

Instructions were issued to increase the speed of all passenger trains to 110 kmph and move this to 130 kmph within the next two to three years in the South, where average speeds reach between 45 kmph and 110 kmph.

‘Super critical’

About 76% of the ‘super critical’ works were complete and the remaining 24%, requiring about ₹7,500 crore, was expected to be completed within a year or so. There were works where 91% was yet to be done in the ‘critical’ category, costing up to ₹85,000. This includes doubling and tripling lines, and traffic facilities at various locations across the country. This is scheduled to be done in three years and funds were being sourced.

“This will give us tremendous mobility. We have identified the works based on the need for efficient operations and also economic considerations like freight movement,” he said.

Freight corridor

The most important development would be completion of the freight corridor of about 3,000 km, between Mumbai-Delhi-Kolkata, by December 2021.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the initiative to call up the Chief Ministers of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh to remove certain bottlenecks,” he said.

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