New Delhi: Indian Railways is all set to make travelling faster, sleeker and a lot better. They now plan to set up high-speed rail network across four metro cities – Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. The government too has earmarked routes to initiate feasibility studies for the Bullet Train project.
The objective is to connect all the four major metro cities in the country. Government has already started working on ground level. They have identified routes and will feasibility studies have been initiated.
Minister of State of Railways, Rajen Gohain in a written reply to a question asked in Lok Sabha had listed main routes connecting four metro cities. He also shared that feasibility studies have been taken up for the same.
The routes identified for the Bullet Train project that will link four major metro cities are as follows:
(i) Delhi-Mumbai,
(ii) Delhi-Kolkata (via Lucknow)
(iii) Mumbai-Chennai
(iv) Delhi-Nagpur segment of Delhi-Chennai,
(v) Mumbai-Nagpur segment of Mumbai-Kolkata
(vi) Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru
Gohain also communicated that feasibility studies for three routes have already started. These routes are Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru, Delhi-Nagpur and Mumbai-Nagpur. The studies have started under government-to-government cooperation with the governments of Germany, China and Spain.
The minister also asserted that currently only one project, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (MAHSR) project has been sanctioned. This has been started after securing technical as well as financial assistance from Japan’s government.
Country’s first ever Bullet Train
India’s first ever Bullet Train network will come between Mumbai in Maharashtra and Ahmedabad in Gujarat. The high-speed rail corridor promises to reduce travel time from 7 hours to 2 hours. For this E-5 series running on Shinkansen technology rakes will be used. The train will have seating capacity of 750 passengers and will have 10 coaches initially. Later on the number of coaches is likely to increase to 15, taking the seating capacity to 1,250 passengers.
