On Thursday, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's Minister of railroads, announced plans to increase the railroads' passenger capacity from the current 800 million to 1,000 million in the next four to five years.
One of Vaishnaw's stated goals for his ministry is to reduce travel times.
Currently, the trains transport almost 800,000,000 people per year. As the population rises, Vaishnaw told reporters at the Rail Bhawan, "we have to increase the capacity to 1,000 crore in four to five years."
To meet the larger number of riders, he stated, "we need 3,000 additional trains that will make several trips."
There are about 69,000 brand-new coaches available, and the railway industry produces around 5,000 brand-new coaches annually.
According to the sources, the railways can add 200–250 new trains year with all of these initiatives, in addition to the 400–450 Vande Bharat trains that will be introduced in the future years.
According to Vaishnaw, the railways' expansion of the rail network and efforts to increase train speed are both aimed at reducing travel times.
He explained that, "along with scheduled stoppages, a long route train has to decrease its speed at several cautions and curves along the route," so minimizing the time it takes to accelerate and decelerate is crucial.
With better acceleration and deceleration at bends, stations, and cautions, "the Delhi-Kolkata route from Rajdhani Express will shave two hours and twenty minutes off the current total travel time," Vaishnaw claimed.
He claimed that Vande Bharat's four-times-better acceleration and deceleration compared to other mail and express trains accounted for its significantly faster average speed and reduced journey time.
Since rolling out Vande Bharat across the country will take some time, he added, the railroads are coming up with a stopgap measure to boost acceleration and deceleration by doubling the present practice.
Push-pull configuration mode is a technology that makes this a reality. All new coaches will include this push-pull layout, which will eventually be implemented on all coaches. Vaishnaw predicted that improvements to long-distance trains will significantly reduce journey times.
Besides the push-pull technique, Vaishnaw also mentioned that instead of having a train with separate coaches joined together, the railways is trying to have a train with integrated 22 coaches (a train set with 22 coaches) which will offer various benefits for the passengers.
"So, instead of cranking out coaches from our factories, now we shall turn out trains. According to him, "they are safe and convenient in a number of ways" because of the many safeguards included.
According to Vaishnav, a major increase in capacity is achieved by laying approximately 5,000 km of rails annually.
Work has begun in numerous locations where construction of as many as one thousand flyovers and underpasses was approved. Our goal for this year is 1,200, up from 1,002 last year, of flyovers and underpasses," Vaishnaw said.
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