By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD
Last fortnight I had to travel to Chennai for a medical conference and I chose to go by the Vande Bharat train. I did this for two reasons.
Firstly, although there is a flight facility to travel between Mysuru and Chennai and back, with the actual flight time between the two cities being just 90 minutes, the timings did not quite suit my requirements. And, to take a more conveniently timed flight from Bengaluru to Chennai, with the mandatory early reporting and the travel time to Bengaluru, this journey too takes far more time than the total of six-and-a-half hours the train journey takes.
If you also take into account the very real possibility of being held up in a traffic jam somewhere on the way to the airport, the possibility of missing the flight too, becomes all too real and it happens quite frequently these days.
There was a second and more important reason why I chose to travel by train this time. This was because I used to love train travel from the earliest days of my childhood and I had not been able to go anywhere by train for a good many years and so I thought that this short trip would be a good opportunity to relive those days and see how things are now.
Since I did not know how good or bad this experience would be, I was naturally circumspect enough not to take the risk of trying it out on a much longer trip, that would entail travelling overnight and putting myself to the inconvenience of sailing on uncertain, if not uncharted waters.
By uncertain waters, I mean having to experience some of the rather odd things which my friends say are the bane of long train journeys in our country over recent times. These include long delays enroute, unclean coaches and toilets, unclean sheets and bed linen, unsatisfactory food and service, the frequent unwelcome company of gate-crashing, unreserved passengers and sometimes even blood-thirsty bedbugs!
Yes, quite frequently, we read of almost all of these problems, in the many letters that are written to the editors of newspapers, to draw the attention of otherwise inattentive authorities, to them.
This train that I am talking about is supposed to cover the exactly five hundred kilometres between Mysuru and Chennai, in exactly six-and-a-half hours, which it does. But to do justice to being called a super-fast train, I feel that it can do much better, even without increasing the rated maximum speed for which it is made. With the four stops enroute that take a total of about fifteen minutes, this train travels at an average speed of about eighty kilometres per hour, with its highest speed being 130 kilometres per hour, which it does, only over very short stretches. Most of the time it runs like any other ordinary train and sometimes even at a painfully slow pace especially when it passes through the stations where it has no instructions or intentions of stopping.
Even if it had been operated at an average speed of about 95 kph, with its four stops enroute, it would have done the entire journey, very conveniently in five hours, thus saving an hour-and-a-half of time for the passengers, making a very big difference to their convenience.
There is certainly much room and need too, for improvement, in this respect. In all other respects, it is a respectable train because it is very comfortable, with reasonably good seats and the excellent air-damped suspension that gives you a smooth ride, without any bumping and bouncing. As can be expected, the premium category seats which are much wider, being only four in a row, instead of the five in the ordinary class, offer more comfort although the latter too have ample leg space and are much wider and far more comfortable than what you get on any flight.
The food served onboard, for those who opt for it at an additional cost, is acceptably good too, with the serving staff being very helpful, obliging and courteous. As far as I’m concerned, this latter attribute is far more important in making any dining experience more memorable and I always go back to the places where I get it and I always come back home, very happy and smiling.
The toilets on the train are very spacious and maintained in a reasonably clean state, with toilet and tissue paper provided. They would certainly have been much more presentable and welcoming, if only our people had learnt to treat public toilets too like how they treat the ones in their homes! Overall, it was a happy experience for me, to be back on a train, after a very long time although I can at best only call it a journey on a Vande Bharat shuttle, rather than on a superfast train.
But like all of you, I think that some very good days of train travel in our country are certainly on the distant horizon, though not around the next bend in the track. I say this because for some reasons which are not hard to comprehend, fast train travel seems to be taking an inordinately long time to arrive, despite the ongoing efforts to get our very first bullet train like the ones in Japan, to connect Mumbai and Ahmedabad. This is scheduled to do its Surat-Bilimoria first phase run in exactly a year’s time, to mark our eightieth Independence Day. Once it is fully operational, by the year 2029, it is supposed to cover the 508-km distance between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, at an average speed of 250kph, slashing the present six-hour travel time to just two hours.
But considering the rather slow pace of the project works so far, I feel that we will certainly have to push the deadline much further. Just importing the train or the technology from Japan is not enough. We will also have to import their work culture and learn to work like the Japanese. But, sooner or later, when that happens, with Ahmedabad being a dry city and Mumbai being one of our wettest ones, the days will certainly come, when people will be able to say…Jio Ahmedabad mein, aur Pio Mumbai mein!
e-mail: kjnmysore@rediffmail.com
This post was published on August 9, 2026 7:30 pm