I happened to stumble upon a piece of news that was covered by very few media houses, yet it sent an electric shock through rail fans. This came when Northern Central Railway requested the authorities to reduce the speed of premium trains like Gatiman, Vande Bharat, and Shatabdi to 130 kmph, citing safety concerns.
It felt like a regression altogether, because safety measures do not fail overnight. If they break, they must have been compromised for years. That reality surfaced only when the Kanchanjunga Express met with an accident. What made it even more shocking was the fact that the train was running at just 45 kmph at the time. Either the installed safety measures, such as Kavach, failed miserably, or we did not validate its edge cases in the manner it should have been done.
This episode motivated me to write, after researching the main bottlenecks in Indian rail infrastructure and how Indian Railways has attempted to tackle these issues over time.
To begin this blog, I will highlight some of the priority corridors that are destined to witness 160 kmph operations and are being treated as focus sections or divisions. One of the most talked-about among them is the NDLS to CNB section. It is a remarkable stretch, especially when we consider the ease with which it handles 130 kmph, almost like a piece of cake. The fastest Vande Bharat simply glides through this section. This is not to discount the speeds maintained in other sections, particularly in Madhya Pradesh and around the Agra stretch, which have also shown steady improvements.
Newspapers are laden with a series of articles that infuse hope and despair at the same time. One day, we read that significant progress has been made; the very next day, we hear that the project has been delayed by another year. This on-and-off narrative has become synonymous with the CNB section. The same gung-ho optimism followed the Mumbai–Ahmedabad section as well, yet the upgrades there, too, remain elusive.
In the following posts, I will cover these individual issues one by one.
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