Two minutes silence to be observed for the martyred CRPF personnel at Vande Bharat Express flagging off ceremony.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will observe two minutes silence to mourn the death 37 martyred CRPF personnel before flagging the Vande Bharat Express from the New Delhi railway station on Friday morning. The flagging off ceremony is scheduled at 10.45am.
There will also be a 2 minutes short film on Vande Bharat Express. Sources said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to inspect the train after which it will be flagged off from platform 1.
Meanwhile, there was utter chaos at the station as there was a single metal detector for the several media persons who came from across India and world to be part of the inaugural run. The entry was through the executive class coach and further into the chair car coach. In total there are 1128 seats in this 18 coach train - two executive and 14 chair car - that also includes two power cars for running it.
This fully AC train will run 5 days a week, barring Monday and Thursday, and complete its journey in 8 hours. It will have halts at Kanpur and Allahabad.
Railway Minister Piyush Goyal and members of the Railway Board will be on board the train on its inaugural journey, it said.
The train will travel from Delhi to Varanasi in nine hours and forty-five minutes. This includes stoppage time of 40 minutes each at Kanpur and Allahabad where there will be special programmes. At the New Delhi railway station, Modi will inspect the facilities in the train and address a gathering on the occasion.
The semi-high speed Train 18, which has been recently rechristened Vande Bharat Express, can run up to a maximum speed of 160 kmph and has travel classes like the Shatabdi trains but with better facilities. It aims to provide a totally new travel experience to passengers.
It has 16 air-conditioned coaches of which two are executive class. The total seating capacity is 1,128 passengers. It is much more than the conventional Shatabdi rakes of equal number of coaches, thanks to shifting of all electric equipment below the coaches and seats in the driving coach also.
All coaches are equipped with automatic doors, GPS-based audio-visual passenger information system, on-board hotspot WiFi for entertainment purposes and very comfortable seating. All toilets are bio-vacuum type. The lighting is dual mode, that is diffused for general illumination and personal for every seat.
Every coach has a pantry facility to serve hot meals and, hot and cold beverages. The insulation is meant to keep heat and noise to very low levels for additional passenger comfort.
Adding up the green footprints, the train has regenerative braking system which can save up to 30 per cent of electrical energy.
The Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai, has been the force behind the completely in-house design and manufacture of this train which was completed in just 18 months.
(With inputs from PTI, Shashank Rao )
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