RailEnquiry

High speed rail is a crucial piece of having a modern, 21st century transportation system, reducing reliance on burning fossil fuels and bringing metropolitan areas closer together to spur more economic activity. As California blazes ahead with its high speed rail plan, other countries are pushing forward with their own HSR expansions, particularly China and India.

India is moving ahead with several new lines:

The Indian Government is planning to introduce measures to fast track the development of a high-speed rail network in the country.

The push came at a recent meeting where officials decided that development of key infrastructure projects, including high-speed rail must be pushed through and completed on time….

Of the eight high-speed corridors, that will be developed across the country, the government decided to take the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail project on the priority basis.

The 492-km long Mumbai-Ahmedabad rail route will be the first bullet train with a speed of 300 km per hour that will cover the distance in two-and-a-half hours rather than current travel time of seven hours.

The other seven high-speed corridors which have got in-principle approval are Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Hyderabad- Dornakal-Vijayawada-Chennai, Howrah-Haldia, Chennai-Bangalore- Coimbatore-Trivandrum, Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Allahabad-Patna, Delhi-Chandigarh-Amritsar and Delhi-Jaipur-Ajmer-Jodhpur.

Except Delhi-Amritsar and Delhi-Jodhpur, pre-feasibility study has been undertaken for all the corridors.

Those are significant time savings for India’s popular railways, and would be the basis of a national system connecting India’s major and growing cities. Of course, there’ll need to be new investments in electricity generation infrastructure – last week’s massive blackouts in India indicated serious problems with power that will have to be resolved for Indian HSR to succeed. But that work will have to be done anyway and there’s every reason to believe HSR will succeed there. ..............(more)