Gone are the days of long tiresome travels, here comes a good news for all the city beautiful folks! Indian Railways have set up a project for new semi-high speed trains that would soon be running between Delhi and Chandigarh. The task of submitting the execution strategy and implementation model involving up-gradation of the Delhi-Chandigarh route has been assigned to SNCF, the French Railways.

Semi-high Trains – Reducing the Tavel time

These semi-high speed trains are likely to cut the travel time to two hours with just one stop at Ambala. That’s a significant reduction in travel time given the distance of 245 km’s being currently covered in three hours thirty minutes by Shatabdi Express and up to seven and a half hours if you opt for the cheapest route to Chandigarh. At present, there are 13 direct trains running from New Delhi to Chandigarh, including the Kalka Shatabdi, the Uhl Janshatabdi, and the Himalayan Queen.

The Delhi-Chandigarh corridor is one of the busiest in the country and is spread over 245 km long route. With around ten major curves in 32 km on the current rail route, this isn’t really the ideal route for fast trains. Despite all the curves on the proposed semi-high speed route, The Indian Railways is going full steam to achieve the target to run trains at speed of up to 200 Km/hr.

Earlier, the plan was to straighten up these curves to facilitate uninterrupted speed but now the public transporter will not go for straightening up the curves and instead opt for slowing down while negotiating the track, according to the railways.

Project Cost

The cost for this semi-high speed train project could hover at around Rs 10,000 crore, with Rs. 46 crore per km to run the train at 200 Km/Hr. The cost will include upgrading the Delhi-Chandigarh corridor and rolling stock. If completed successfully, it will make the journey from New Delhi to Chandigarh a lot easier.

Other Priority Routes

Indian Railways have identified nine priority routes for modernization and introduction of semi-high speed trains. The Delhi-Chandigarh route is one of those nine proposed routes. Other routes include Delhi-Kanpur, Delhi-Agra, Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Mumbai-Goa, Nagpur-Bilaspur, Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysore, Chennai-Hyderabad and Secunderabad-Nagpur. The total track distance to be upgraded is 6,400 Kilometers.