Most of the rail sections that connect Mumbai and Delhi are already overloaded and can be mitigated substantially only if the freight traffic moves to the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, notes Ramakrishnan T S.
The sooner we complete the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor and introduce Talgo trains, the closer we will be to fulfilling our high-speed bullet train dream.
For this, we need to create conditions suitable for the roll-out of these trains
The Indian Railways has announced it will conduct test runs between Mumbai and Delhi with Spain Talgo trains, which can run at speeds of 160 to 200 km per hour on existing tracks.
Currently, the travel time between Mumbai and Delhi varies between 16 and 30 hours, depending on the type of train taken.
Rajdhani, Duronto and August Kranti Rajdhani take about 16 hours, while mail/express trains take about 20 to 30 hours.
Talgo trains, on the other hand, can complete the 1,430-km journey in 10 or 12 hours.
Although more than two dozen trains run between Mumbai and Delhi in both directions daily, many of them pass through Mumbai and Delhi, leaving little scope for Mumbai-Delhi passengers to avail of the seats on these trains.
Unavailability of tickets for train travel, coupled with travel time eating into productive day time, has pushed Mumbai-Delhi passengers to resort to low-cost airlines, where end-to-end travel time is not more than six hours.
According to the recently published report of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on the number of passengers between various origin-destination pairs, Mumbai-Delhi topped with 472,000 passengers in August 2015 in both directions.
This works out to 15,700 passengers a day.
Given such a huge current air ridership, in principle, there is great scope for semi-high-speed trains such as the Talgo trains to be operated between Mumbai and Delhi.
The question is: Will the introduction of Talgo trains attract air passengers to train travel? Although only a detailed study would be able to assess the modal shift that could happen from air to Talgo trains, modal shift essentially depends on the schedule (departure and arrival time) of trains as much as reduction in travel time.
However, it can categorically be said that only if Talgo trains are scheduled with departures between 5 pm and 9 pm and arrival between 5 am and 9 am -- as this would save day time for passengers -- the modal shift from air travel would be noticeable.
Those who travel by train anyway would be more than willing to switch to Talgo trains, given the reduction in travel time would be anywhere between four and 15 hours, and the benefit of scheduling that would save day time.
With such a fast and affordable travel facility, there would be some induced travel demand, too.
Thus, there is a great opportunity to run at least 24 trains every day in both directions, departing between 5 pm and 9 pm, with a headway of 20 minutes or so, and more or less full occupancy.
If train speeds rise up to 200 kmph, it would be untenable to have level crossings -- both manned and unmanned -- as these would jeopardise the safety of people, vehicles and cattle.
The closing and opening of manned level crossings being interlocked with signalling systems, it is impossible to operate trains at speeds of 160 to 200 kmph.
Will it be possible to operate Talgo trains once all level crossings are eliminated with road over-bridges or road under-bridges?
No.
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