Talgo Trials: New Mission To Complete Delhi-Mumbai Journey In 12 Hours

India is restarting speed trials for Talgo trains today (Wednesday) as part of Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu’s ambitious plan to cut travel time between major railway stations.

Talgo will resume trials on the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani route pulled by an Indian Railways WAP5 electric locomotive  at a maximum permissible speed of 140 kmph (kilometre per hour). The journey is expected to take 12 hours and 12 minutes.

Presently, the Rajdhani Express takes almost 16 hours on this route. This speed is said to be the fastest till date on Indian tracks, much ahead of the likes of Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Gatimaan.

These test runs follow the not-so-successful trail of the Spanish-made train last month (August), where Talgo was tested at a speed of 115 kmph between Barailey and Moradabad, at 130-150 kmph between Mathura and Palwal and at 18 kmph between New Delhi and Mumbai. However, the last leg was affected due to water-logging on tracks, which delayed the train.

Talgo is a Spanish firm manufacturing semi-high-speed (160-250 kmph) and high-speed (350 kmph) passenger trains. It has lightweight aluminum-bodied coaches with special features, which make these coaches travel 20 percent faster on curves.

At present, India’s fastest train is Gatimaan Express, which runs at a speed of 160 kmph.

Prabhu had spoken about his dream of making the Indian Railways’ infrastructure so robust, that train travel between two parts of India takes less than 12 hours.

“Talgo is very keen to manufacture in India; this will give impetus to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India dream,” Prabhu had said earlier.

The railways has adopted a multi-pronged strategy to implement its high-speed train projects on various routes across India. The high-speed train programme has two aims; one to run trains at a speed of over 300 kmph and the other to have semi-high speed trains that will ply at 160-200 kmph speeds.

Additionally, the idea is to run existing trains at higher speeds and to introduce faster train sets. These include, bullet trains, semi high-speed trains, the Talgo trials and Mission Raftar. Apart from these four ways, the Railways is also working on the introduction of Tejas, a faster train service, which it claims requires minimal technological inputs. The aim is to attain speeds of above 130 kmph with Tejas trains.