Chinese Railway Experts List Reasons Why High-Speed Trains Can’t Run At 200 Km/Ph
New Delhi : Too many circular bends and lack of partition walls to prevent human beings and animals come on the railway tracks were among many factors noted by a team of Chinese railway experts as reasons why India cannot run the bullet trains or the high-speed trains at 200 km per hour between the metros as announced by Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu in his budget.
The Chinese engineers travelled from Delhi to Agra on a rail engine along with the officers of the Indian high speed rail corridor project on Saturday to assess the difficulties in running the high-speed trains on the Indian tracks. The Chinese Railways is preparing a project report on running the high-speed train on the Delhi-Chennai corridor and as such its engineers wanted to assess difficulties they may face.
They told the Indian Railway officers that there are so many bends at short distances and that compels slowdown of the train. They also faulted load on the tracks by running of two trains on tracks located just metres away. They also expressed concern over so many crossings and gates.
The governments have been giving the dream of running the bullet trains at a speed of more than 200 km, but the fact is that even today the VIP trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi are not run at more than 70 to 86 km per hour. As back as in June 1970, the Railway Board had declared Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Howrah, Delhi-Chennai and Mumbai-Howrah as the trunk routes, declaring their tracks as fit for running trains up to 160 km, but it only remains a pipedream.
Construction of one kilometer of high speed railway track will cost Rs. 100-140 crore and the country will need a total of Rs 80,000 crore to lay the entire high speed train corridor, Lok Sabha was informed on Monday.
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said the cost of laying one km of high speed track was 10 to 14 times higher than the construction of a normal railway track.
“We will need Rs 80,000 crore to construct the entire length of the planned high speed tracks,” he said replying a supplementary during question hour.
Prabhu said Indian Railways currently does not have any high speed corridor and such corridors identified for pre-feasibility studies included Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Delhi-Agra-Lucknow Varanasi-Patna, Howrah-Haldia, Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulum Thiruvananthapuram.
India is currently considering two corridors for high-speed trains. While Japan is conducting feasibility study for the Bullet train project in Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor, China is interested in the Delhi-Chennai route.
India and China have also agreed to cooperate to identify the technical inputs required to increase speed on the existing railway line from Chennai to Mysore via Bangalore.
The Delhi-Chennai route is part of the proposed Diamond Quadrilateral project, which aims to build a high-speed train network between different cities, including Delhi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Chennai, Chennai-Kolkata, Kolkata-Delhi and Mumbai-Kolkata.
