High-speed rail connect till Pune next

Not just Ahmedabad, but Pune, too, will be connected via the Bullet train from Mumbai. The High Speed Rail Corporation has decided to take up 7 smaller corridors connecting two or more cities in the near future.

To begin with, in the pipeline, there is one connecting Mumbai with Pune as well. "These will be namely those corridors that will allow people to reach anywhere between one to three hours. This way, we can directly compete with the airlines as the fares will be lesser than them," said an official from High Speed Rail Corporation.

For instance, the authorities expect to reach Pune within 75 minutes. By road it takes three and half to four hours, while after calculating the journey to and from the airport, plus the check-in time; it will be well over three hours for Pune.

Across India, 4,100 kms of high speed rail has been planned. The likelihood of initiating projects in these corridors in the next 5 years is low and so no attempt is being made to estimate the cost of these projects. The next immediate project is likely to be Delhi-Amritsar. Apart from that, other Bullet train corridors are Delhi-Patna, Howrah-Kolkata, Hyderabad-Chennai, Chennai-Bengaluru-Thiruvananthapuram and Delhi-Jaipur-Jodhpur.