Title - ‘Modified’, slower bullet trains for Indian tracks

NEW DELHI: The train sets (bullet trains), which India had proposed to acquire, will be “intensively modified” so that they can run at a much slower speed on the country’s existing Broad Gauge (BG) tracks.

These customised train sets in turn are likely to raise the acquisition costs by several folds, an official from a visiting Japanese team informed at the first meeting of the India-Japan working sub-group on High Speed Rail on Thursday.

It had earlier been estimated that the six train sets would come at a cost of R25,000 crore.

Bullet trains - designed to run at a speed of 325 km per hour (kmph) - are run on the standard gauge; but the railways wants to run these at a speed of 110 kmph on BG routes.

The railways will also need to carry out massive upgrades in the track structure and signaling systems - which will also come at a huge cost, officials said.

The railways plan to build a “Golden Rail Corridor” for running these slow-moving bullet trains on four other routes apart from the Delhi-Mumbai sector.