PIB News Update: Minister of Railways and Commerce & Industry, Shri Piyush Goyal has informed that The Railways is undertaking measures for improving speed of both passenger and freight trains. Improvement in average speed of trains is a continuous exercise for Railways. Further, the Government in August 2019 has approved two projects for raising of speed to 160 Kmph on existing New Delhi-Mumbai (including Vadodara-Ahmedabad) and New Delhi-Howrah (including Kanpur-Lucknow) routes. In addition, the Railways have sanctioned a large number of capacity enhancement works over various zones which when commissioned, are bound to increase the speed of trains and cut travel time on various routes.
At present, Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (HSR) corridor is the only HSR Project which is sanctioned and the same is under execution with the technical & financial cooperation from Government of Japan. Further, Ministry of Railways has decided to undertake Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the following six HSR corridors:
(i) Delhi – Noida – Agra – Kanpur – Lucknow- Varanasi (865 kms)
(ii) Delhi – Jaipur – Udaipur – Ahmedabad (886 kms)
(iii) Mumbai – Nasik – Nagpur (753 kms)
(iv) Mumbai – Pune – Hyderabad (711 kms)
(v) Chennai – Bangalore – Mysore (435 kms)
(vi) Delhi – Chandigarh – Ludhiana – Jalandhar – Amritsar (459 kms)
The work of undertaking DPR has been entrusted to National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd. (NHSRCL).