Higher Speed Intercity Express Plans in India

Indian Railways has now been given the mission to deliver within 5 years, express running time between New Delhi and Howrah (Kolkata) and New Delhi and Mumbai Central of roughly 12 hours. The plan is to increase the maximum speed on these two trunk routes to 160kph (100mph) to get an average end point to end point speed of 120kph (75mph) for the Rajdhani Express trains. The rolling stock capable of such speeds is already available. most of the work is on permanent way, fencing, grade crossing elimination and deployment of ETCS-2. These two trunk routes carry almost a third of the total trunk passenger traffic in India!

https://www.financialexpress.com/in...an-railways-160-kmph-12-hours-trains/1669200/

Bet India gets it done before we get 110 mph between Chi-stl.

They would definitely need to stamp down hard on trespassing. This is probably just as much a question of changing attitudes as it is of physical fencing.

Steve4031 said:

Bet India gets it done before we get 110 mph between Chi-stl.

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Note that India is planning 75 mph point to point speed, close to that of the Acela, with a maximum speed of only 100 mph.

MARC Rider said:

Note that India is planning 75 mph point to point speed, close to that of the Acela, with a maximum speed of only 100 mph.

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Currently they manage 55-60mph with 80mph max speed using electric loco hauled stock. This is close to what Brightline manages in the US for example.

They plan to move to distributed power EMU stock with considerably better acceleration/deceleration as part of their 100mph Max - 70-75mph Average - plan.

Just to give you an idea, these are roughly 900 mile runs (think New York - Chicago) with about 5-8 en route commercial stops, with strictly enforced duration of 2-5 mins each. The entire journey will be over minimally triple tracked ROW most of the way, with short segments of double track only, and somewhat longer segments of quadruple or more tracks. So in general the cost of overtaking is virtually zero to the faster trains given good dispatching. i.e. they are often able to run at max allowed speed for long distances between commercial stops.

cirdan said:

They would definitely need to stamp down hard on trespassing. This is probably just as much a question of changing attitudes as it is of physical fencing.

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The fencing is mostly to keep animals off tracks. Everyone understands that it is a fool's errand trying to stop human trespassing in India. The only known way to do so effectively is to build elevated or underground tracks.

All that one can hope for is that they will get used to the higher speeds and know how to get off the relevant track in time to not get hit. So far the trespasser hit rate on the only 100mph train does not seem to have been any worse than for the rest on that route, which in general happens to be pretty low, considering how dense the traffic is on that route. Maybe the trend will repeat elsewhere. Who knows?

Riding one of these trains would give one an idea of what is was like to ride the 20th Century Limited as far as speed is concerned.