Railways to speed up Delhi-Mumbai-Howrah Rajdhani to reduce travel time

NEW DELHI: Piyush Goyal, Railway Minister, informed the parliament on July 17, about the plans to bring down travel time of Rajdhani trains on the busy Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes by over three hours with an investment of about Rs 14,000 crore in infrastructure.

Goyal replied in a response to a query in Lok Sabha that two projects for increasing the train speed to 160 kilometer per hour (kmph) on current corridors of New Delhi-Mumbai and New Delhi-Howrah at an estimated cost of Rs 13,491.25 crore are under consideration.

“This will reduce the travel time of premium Rajdhani trains to 12 hours as against the present travel time of 15 hours 30 minutes for Mumbai Rajdhani and 17 hours for Howrah Rajdhani. No time frame can be indicated at this stage before the projects are approved,” added Goyal.

This is one of the 11 proposals prepared by the railways in its 100-day plan, with instructions to initiate immediate action to implement them by August 31.

The railways had set a target to ramp up the speed of the trains on these routes from the present 130 kmph to 160 kmph in the next four years, according to the proposal.