Faster Trains with Better Safety
That should be the motto of Indian Railways for the next 10 years
Without higher speed, #IndianRailways will become largely irrelevant as people will be forced to shift to the road & air modes.
Result: Reduced mobility of people because rail is the cheapest, most energy efficient and most environmentally friendly mode of transport, negative impacts of marginalization of rail can be imagined. I first wrote about this in 2017 in above article in IE.
What does the #government need to do to translate this motto into reality:
Build new 200-250 kmph high-speed rail lines on about 10,000 km of trunk routes.
Upgrade about 15,000 km of the existing lines.
Total cost: About 7 to 8 lakh crore, which country would spend if it were to build just 2500 km of Standard Gauge Bullet Train lines.
Indian Railways should not build any more new Bullet Train lines and DFCs, and focus all investment into improving and expanding the country’s Broad Gauge network.
It should also reconfigure the #EDFC & #WDFC into mixed traffic lines, read below..
Finally #RailwayBoard is doing what I have been saying-
“A pivotal development within these projects involves the #transformation of a significant stretch that was initially part of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (#EDFC) into regular mixed-use rail tracks, this is for the Eastern DFC. Hope they do the same with the Western DFC also soon.”
A welcome corrective action, though a little late.
Hope they also change the gauge of MA HSR from #StandardGauge to #BroadGauge.
Alok Kumar Verma, IRSE (Rtd.)