There is a diversion in view of the Railway Board on what should be the maximum speed capacity of these trains
Railways’ most ambitious purchase plan to buy 200 kmph high-speed trainsets to replace Rajdhani and Shatabdi rakes has now gone back to the drawing board. There is a diversion in view of the Railway Board on what should be the maximum speed capacity of these trains.
A section of officials believe that buying expensive 200 kmph train sets now and running them at lower speeds till our tracks are upgraded to 200 kmph would be a financial folly. They point out that by the time the tracks are upgraded, which might take anything between five to eight years, it would be possible to get better technology train sets at the same cost or lesser. The railway ministry had earmarked Rs 2,952 crore for the current fiscal to buy 15 such train sets. The total cost of all these train sets was pegged at Rs 4,990 crore.
Railway Ministry Chief Spokesperson Anil Saxena confirmed that the ministry is studying various speed potentials for the train sets it intends to procure before coming up with a tender. The plan to buy train sets to speed up some of the congested truck routes of the railways was taken in early 2015 and a bidding process was also started. Though five consortia qualified for the process, none of them submitted financial bids leading to the collapse of the procurement process. These five consortia were Alstom and BEML, CAF and Bombardier, Hitachi and Ansaldo, Kawasaki, Toshiba and BHEL and the fifth one of Siemens.
According to officials, this move was made after going through the recently concluded trials between Delhi-Mumbai of Spanish train Talgo. Despite having a top speed potential of 200 kmph, the maximum speed it could achieve during the trials was 117.5 kmph when it made the trip between Delhi-Mumbai on September 11 in 11 hours and 48 minutes.
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