Progress is being made in India’s high-speed rail revolution. Railways are one of the most well-known things about India. They run from Mumbai’s crowded commuter trains to in-a-day express mail trains that look like a city on wheels and the stunning Darjeeling & Himalayan “Toy Train.”
Without them, it’s not likely that the country would have become the financial superpower we see today.
However, as the country grows, its railways are under more and more pressure to keep up with the times, send faster trips, and carry more cargo to serve India’s growing businesses.
When compared to China, India’s next-door neighbour and rival for regional supremacy, traditional systems may have worked well for India, but they’re becoming more and more out-of-date. This is especially true when compared to China’s rapid growth.
Each stage of society and community, from the smallest rural village to one of the world’s most densely populated cities, relies on the community to keep the country moving in the right direction.
On the Maharajas’ Express, a hotel-on-wheels, you can live like a king. This train is thought to be one of the most luxurious in India.
The Indian Railways (IR) network is made up of 126,510 kilometres (78,610 miles) of track. It runs 19,000 trains a day and serves almost 8,000 stations. It’s possible to find more than 12,700 locomotives that can move 76,000 passenger cars and almost three million freight cars.
Christian Wolmar, a railway historian and the author of “Rails and the Raj,” says that “only a few countries are defined by their railways, but India’s current history is linked to the development of its huge rail network.”
In 1832, a plan was made to build the first Indian railways. This was just seven years after the world’s first public rail line, the Stockton & Darlington Railway, was built in England.
India’s Tejas Categorical train started running in New Delhi in 2017. It is a very modern, but not very fast train.
However, it wasn’t until April 1853 that the first part of the Nice Indian Peninsular Railway was open to passengers. It connected Mumbai (then Mumbai) and Thane. In the future, India’s first high-speed passenger train will connect the two cities of Mumbai and Ahmedabad. It will be part of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train line.
Even though India’s railways were mostly built by the British for military purposes, Indians took to them like almost no other people, creating almost insatiable demand and huge growth in the second half of the 1800s, says Wolmar.
It didn’t matter if it was for business or family, pilgrimage or commute. This demand made the railways profitable, and they reached every corner of India before many other parts of the world did.
“They may not have been built to learn about Indians, but the railways had an amazing side effect that still helps the country run in the twenty-first century.”
Slow speeds and high goals
Over 8 billion people used the IR in 2019–20. It also moved 1.2 billion tonnes of goods. 1.4 million people work for it, which makes it one of the world’s biggest non-military groups.
It’s not even close to the 2 million people who work for China Railway.
At a Mumbai train station on January 17, 2022, a passenger looks out of the window of a long-distance train and sees the city.
Slow speeds are still disappointing when compared to European rails or those in China and Japan. There are only a few special express trains that can go faster than 100 mph, but the national average for long-distance express is just 50 kph (31.4 mph), and most passenger and commuter trains can only reach 32 kph (20 mph) on average.
Freight trains usually go about 24 kph (15 mph), but they can usually only go up to 55-75 kph. Over the next 30 years, traffic is expected to get worse until more space is made available.
There are seven main routes that make up just over 16% of the whole city, but they carry 41% of all visitors now. Round 14 of IR’s community is working at 100% to 150% of their normal capacity, which could have a huge impact on the rest of the country when something goes wrong.
India has a three-pronged answer. High-speed passenger trains between major cities should be built. Thousands of miles of new high-capacity cargo rail lines, called Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFCs), should also be built. By 2024, all of the rail lines in the country should be electric.
It is a very risky method, but the first DFCs are already in use, and the electrification work is moving quickly. Three more dedicated freight corridors, totaling 5,750 kilometres, are planned to go along with the first two routes that will be finished this year.
extremely fast cars.
While Japan and China thought high-speed rail was the way to cut travel times, speed up economic growth, and make it easier for people to get around, India thinks it’s the same thing.
An ambitious plan for India’s high-speed rail was put together in 2021. It says that every major city in the north, west, and south of the country should be linked by high-speed rail. Between 300 and 700 kilometres away, cities with at least a million people are getting the most attention.
India has asked for help from Japanese experts, engineers, and money to help build its first line, a 508-kilometer link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in western India.
If all the proposals come to fruition, 12 more routes could get high-speed links over the next few years.
On February 15, 2019, a train called the Vande Bharat Express leaves New Delhi Railway Station. It is a train that isn’t very fast.
A company called the National High-Speed Rail Company Ltd. (NHSRCL) was set up to help finance, build, and manage India’s bullet train projects. It has also been given permission to build eight new lines, including one between New Delhi and Varanasi (958 kilometres), another between Mumbai and Nagpur (736 kilometres), another between New Delhi and Ahmedabad (886 kilometres), another between Mumbai and Hyderabad (711) and one between Chennai and Mysore (760 kilometres) (435 kilometers).
In the first half of 2022, four more corridors were proposed, making the total more than 8,000 kilometres long. Lines would also be built between Hyderabad and Bangalore (618 kilometres), Nagpur-Varanasi (855 kilometres), Patna-Guwahati (850 kilometres), and Amritsar, Punjab, and Kashmir (190 kilometres). This would make it the second-longest high-speed rail network in the world.
There were hopes that the Mumbai-Ahmedabad project, which was announced by Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe in 2017, would be finished in time for the 70th anniversary of Indian independence on August 15, but there have been a lot of problems and delays. At least until at least 2028, the project isn’t finished.
Arguments over the route and protests by farmers and politicians in Maharashtra state caused important delays to land acquisition and route surveys. There wasn’t enough land for farmers to grow crops. Uddhav Thackeray, the chief minister of India, questioned the benefits of the high-speed rail project and called it a “white elephant.” This is in line with anti-high-speed rail sentiment in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom.
Maharashtra only had 30% of the land it needed by September 2021, compared to 97% in Gujarat and 100% everywhere else.
On September 14, 2017, Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posed together in front of a high-speed train simulator.
“Why can’t we improve the infrastructure and run faster trains there?” says Rajendra B. Aklekar, the creator and an Indian rail commentator.
What Indian Railways has done is started a project to make the monitoring and signalling systems better so that trains can go 160 kph on existing lines. A dedicated freight community can also be built across the country to take freight trains out of the system and clear up the main routes.
