Recession special: Railways plan 4 luxury trains

Europe and America is reeling under a recession, but that hasn’t stopped the Indian railways from introducing four luxury train tours in January with an eye on the high-end foreign tourist.

The new train tours — two each for Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata — are along the lines of the palace-on-wheels, and was planned after a joint venture by railways and the travel company Cox and Kings. The tours will wind their leisurely way across the country for eight days and seven nights for a princely tariff of $1,000 a night. Stopovers will include such places as Gaya and Varanasi on the Kolkata route, and Bandhavgarh and Khajuraho on the Mumbai route.

 Rakesh Tandon, the managing director of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), says he is not worried about recession. “We launched these projects because our surveys  showed us that there was a market for these services. Upper-end tourism is still not hit by recession, and we are hoping this will be a profitable venture,” he said. The tours have such evocative names as Celestial Journeys and Royal Line and the railways is going to run these on a 50-50 revenue-sharing model with Cox and Kings.

The Palace-on-Wheels, a pioneering effort of the railways in luxury tourism, started making a profit just a couple of years ago and its southern version, Deccan Queen, is still struggling to make a profit. These experiences have made the railways propose budget versions of these trains.

However, with railway minister Mamata Banerjee keen on appeasing the aam aadmi more than anything else, there’s a doubt whether the project will be given enough rope.