2 Bengaluru-Mumbai trains, Bengaluru-Mangaluru Vande Bharat soon: Railway Minister

Vande Bharat sleeper to Mumbai, superfast via Hubballi & VB for coastal Karnataka

Bengaluru: Minister of Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw on Saturday announced two new Bengaluru-Mumbai trains, including a Vande Bharat sleeper, in the coming months. 

The second train will be a superfast service with LHB coaches via Hubballi, he added. 

He said a Vande Bharat (seater) train connecting Bengaluru and Mangaluru would also be launched soon as technical hurdles had been cleared. 

Railway tracks between Hassan and Mangaluru have been electrified, and testing and trials are underway. Automated Emergency Braking (AEB) systems have been integrated for safety on steep coastal gradients, he added. 

“Within the next few months, we will have a Vande Bharat bewteen Bengaluru and Mangaluru and towards Madgaon,” he stated. 

Vaishnaw visited BEML’s Thippasandra campus and inaugurated a specialised complex to manufacture high-speed B-28 trains, also called Bharat-made bullet trainsets. 

Noting that high-speed rail technology is incredibly complex and intricate, he said its development within the country marks a milestone for indigenous engineering. He hoped that the advent of these trains will cause major cities to be seen as extensions of one another. He cited how travel time between Chennai and Bengaluru would fall to 73 minutes. 

The KSR Bengaluru-CSMT Mumbai Vande Bharat sleeper will run via Guntakal and Kalaburagi with a travel time of 16 hours, as DH reported earlier. 

Trade activist Sajjan Raj Mehta suggested a travel time of around 15 hours with 3AC fares significantly below air tickets. 

The superfast train via Hubballi will be the bi-weekly announced in December, a source in the South Western Railway (SWR) said. 

That service - 16553/16554 SMVT Bengaluru-LTT Mumbai-SMVT Bengaluru - was estimated to cover 1,209 km in about 24 hours at an average speed of 52 kmph, below the threshold for a superfast train. 

The source said that while the route would remain the same, the train’s travel time would shorten because it would be upgraded to a superfast train. 

The Bengaluru-Mangaluru Vande Bharat will be an extension of the existing service between Mangaluru and Madgaon (20645/20646), the source said. “The plan is to start the train from both Bengaluru and Madgaon in the morning using two separate rakes,” the source added. Travel time will be at least an hour shorter than the current fastest train.

Suburban rail progress ‘very good’

The Bengaluru Suburban Railway Project (BSRP) has made “very good” progress following the appointment of a technical person as the head of its implementing agency Vaishnaw said.  “We had requested the state government to appoint a technical person as MD (to K-RIDE - the implementation agency). The state agreed. The prime minister recently reviewed the progress. The work in the last few months has been very good. There’s been good progress on land acquisition too” he added.