Travel time between Mumbai-Chennai to reduce by 45 minutes as Indian Railways complete electrification work

The travel time between Mumbai and Chennai will be reduced at least by 45 minutes in near future said Indian Railways, as the Railways complete the electrification work of the entire Mumbai-Chennai route.

"Progressing swiftly towards a Greener Future! Mumbai-Chennai main route is now fully electrified, after completion of the Mohol-Sholapur route in Maharashtra. With this, 100 per cent electrification of the Golden Quadrilateral-Golden Diagonal Route of IR has been completed," Ministry of Railway tweeted Friday.

Between Mumbai and Chennai, there are three daily trains-- one weekly train on Saturday and one superfast weekly train on Monday that takes the minimum time of 21 hours 35 minutes.

Confirming the development, a senior officer of the central railway said, "now there is no need to change the engine of these trains en route. All these trains will now run end to end powered by electric locomotives."

"Earlier, these trains were partially running on diesel locomotives, as a result, there was a need to change the engine at two locations taking nearly 30 to 45 minutes," added officials.

"For the speed of trains running on the Mumbai-Chennai route, we organized an internal meeting. In the meeting, we wrote to other zonal railways including South Central and Southern railways for the amendment of their time timetable," said a senior officer of CR.

"After the amendment in time-table, travel time of trains running between Mumbai and Chennai will be reduced up to 45 minutes. Whole processes will take around 5 to 6 months," he added.

"Out of around 1,270 kilometres, only 27 km section remains, which will be completed in a couple of months. Work is in full swing now," said an officer of CR.

In addition to this, under the National Rail Plan (NRP), the process of up-gradation work on the Chennai-Delhi and Chennai-Mumbai lines, which have been rated as among the seven high-density routes, will be done which will ensure that trains on these routes can run at up to a speed of 160 kmph.

The measures include laying additional lines, building flyovers and introducing automatic signalling and collision control systems along the entire route by 2031.

The work is going to be done in phases but the speed of the trains is expected to increase where major bottleneck stretches have been eliminated, said a railway official adding that the aim was to make the lines capable of running trains at 160kmph. It will mean that the average speed will increase considerably from the current 70 km to over 100 km.