New Delhi: The Ministry of Railways has decided to go ahead with seven new high-speed bullet train projects, including the Mysuru-Bengaluru-Chennai corridor. It has asked for a Detailed Project Report (DPR) on seven bullet train projects from National High Speed Rail Corp. Ltd (NHSRCL).
The high-speed rail corridors are 942-km Delhi to Varanasi (Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Constituency) including Ayodhya via Noida, Agra and Lucknow; 760-km Varanasi to Howrah via Patna; 886-km Delhi to Ahmedabad via Jaipur and Udaipur; 459-km Delhi to Amritsar via Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Jalandhar; 740-km Mumbai to Nagpur via Nasik; 711-km Mumbai to Hyderabad via Pune and 435-km Chennai to Mysuru via Bengaluru.
The Union budget 2022-23 may announce the projects. The Railways received the DPR on the New Delhi-Varanasi corridor from NHSRCL in November.
Currently, India’s first bullet train project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad is being executed by NHSRCL. According to an NHSRCL spokesperson, a DPR on the Mumbai-Nagpur corridor is in the final stages and it will be submitted to the Railway Ministry in the first quarter of the next fiscal.
Work on preparing DPR for five more bullet train projects including the Mysuru-Bengaluru-Chennai corridor is also progressing well and NHSRCL may be able to complete them within FY23, the spokesperson added.
“The way China has linked almost all its major cities with high-speed bullet trains, the Indian Railways has also decided to provide it to the country’s mega cities in the near future,” senior Railway officials said.
Sushma Gaur, Additional General Manager (Public Relations), NHSRCL, acknowledged that the Ministry of Railways has entrusted the NHSRCL with the tasks of preparing DPRs of seven new high-speed rail corridors projects.
Once the project is implemented, the bullet train from Mysuru to Chennai via Bengaluru will take just two hours and 25 minutes as against the current seven hours in Shatabdi Express which is the fastest train on this route. On a normal train journey, it takes over 10 hours to travel between the two cities. Shatabdi travels at a maximum speed of 110 kms per hour.
The bullet train will run at a maximum speed of 320 kilometres per hour and the actual distance from Mysuru to Chennai is over 485 kilometres while the bullet train corridor will be 435 kilometres. Going by the train speed, it can cover the 145-km distance from Mysuru to Bengaluru in just 45 minutes.
This post was published on December 23, 2021 6:41 pm