There's good news for railway passengers travelling from Mumbai to cities such as Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. The railway ministry has announced that its pilot project to increase the average speed of trains- called Mission Raftaar- on the extremely congested Ghaziabad – Allahabad - Mughalsarai route has been successful and the same experiment can now be tried out on the Mumbai-Delhi, Delhi–Howrah, Howrah-Chennai, Chennai–Mumbai, Delhi–Chennai and Howrah–Mumbai routes.The experiment has the potential to speed the entire railway network because the above mentioned routes are the principal routes of the railways. These 6 routes carry 58% of freight traffic and 52 of coaching traffic with a share of only 15 of the track network, railway statistics show.
The Ghaziabad–Allahabad-Mughalsarai route's upward average speed...
more... revision was brought about by the replacement of loco hauled commuter trains with Main line Electric Multiple Units (MEMU) and Diesel Electric Multiple Units (DEMU) trains. "These MEMU and DEMU trains have a potential for average speed increment up to 20kmph in comparison to loco driven passenger trains. It was this higher speed that made all the difference," said an official.
For implementing this target on the above six routes, 1048 Mainline Electrical Multiple Units (MEMU) coaches and 136 Diesel-Electrical Multiple Units (DEMU) coaches are required. To achieve this target in three years, action plan has been drawn out to ramp up the production of MEMU to 400-500 per year in next three years as against the present level 190 per year at present," the railway ministry said in a statement