After no new trains for at least two and a half months, the Indian Railways is all set to inaugurate nine Vande Bharats on Sunday in one go, including one for poll-bound Rajasthan, ministry officials told News18. The list of the trains that will be inaugurated also includes two each for West Bengal’s Howrah and Tamil Nadu’s Chennai. Kerala and Odisha will also each get a second train.
The nine 8-coach Vande Bharat trains that will hit the tracks from Sunday are Rourkela- Puri, Udaipur-Jaipur, Kasaragod-Thiruvananthapuram, Ranchi-Howrah, Patna-Howrah, Tirunelveli-Chennai, Hyderabad-Bengaluru, Vijayawada-Chennai, and Jamnagar-Ahmedabad.
Speaking to News18, a ministry official confirmed that the Prime Minister will flag off these trains on Sunday.
‘Up to speed’
Currently, 25 Vande Bharat trains are running across the country with five of these inaugurated on the same day in June. On July 7, two of them were flagged off in one go and since then, no new Vande Bharats have been introduced.
News18 reported this month that nine Vande Bharats have left the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai since July and these trains will be inaugurated soon.
News18 also reported that among the zones, the highest (three) have been allocated to the Southern Railways. Of the three Vande Bharat trains for the Southern Zone, one was issued on July 17, another on July 31, and the third was issued on August 18. An equal number of Vande Bharat trains are already operational in the zone.
As of date, 25 Vande Bharat trains are running, with the highest (four) in the Northern Zone. Next are the Southern and Central zones with three trains each, followed by Western, West Central and North Western, with two Vande Bharats each. Nine zones – South East Central, Eastern, East Coast, South Central, South Eastern, Northeast Frontier, East Central, South Western, and North Eastern Railway – have one Vande Bharat each.
New trains
The latest Vande Bharat train will be the third for poll-bound Rajasthan. The state got its first Vande Bharat in April (Ajmer-Delhi) and later in July, it got another (Jodhpur-Sabarmati).
From the new lot, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka are also getting their third Vande Bharat trains.
In May, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, during the inauguration of the first Vande Bharat for Odisha, told News18 that soon a train will be flagged off between Puri-Rourkela. Odisha is going for polls in early 2024.
Kerala got its first Vande Bharat in April between Thiruvananthapuram and Kasaragod. Interestingly, the second train is also running on the same route but will pass through Alappuzha, while the earlier one was via Kottayam. The rest of the stoppages of the two trains are the same.
Currently, out of the 25 Vande Bharat trains operational, six are from Delhi for Dehradun, Ajmer, Varanasi, Katra, Bhopal, and Amb Andaura. There are five trains for Maharashtra, with four operational from Mumbai – for Gandhinagar, Shirdi, Sholapur, and Madgoan. There’s also one between Nagpur and Bilapsur.
