French railway on track to conduct high-speed train study

French railway SNCF has snatched the initiative from the Japanese by submitting a proposal with the Railways to conduct a feasibility study for the 500-km high-speed rail corridor on the Delhi-Amritsar route.
The proposal was made by a three-member team from SNCF that met railway ministry officials a few days ago.

The Japanese and the French are the world leaders in high-speed train technology. While the Japanese are known for their superfast Bullet train, the French have high-speed trains under the TGV brand.

These trains have speeds over 300 km per hour. SNCF had recently conducted a trial speed test where its train had created a world record by touching 574 km per hour. While the French technology uses two powerful high-speed locomotives attached to the front and rear of the train to gain speed, the Japanese depend on  light-weight coaches to get speed.

The Japanese have been very aggressive in India in the railway transportation arena. They are frontrunners in funding the high-speed freight corridor and have already financed the Delhi metro project amongst others. Also, Japanese companies, like Mitsubishi, have aggressively bid for contract for railway wagons.

The railway ministry has plans to set up very high-speed train corridors throughout the country, on which it intends to run trains at a speed of 300 km per hour.

Apart from the Delhi-Amritsar route, which was the first route short-listed for the project, the ministry has now earmarked other routes like Mumbai-Vadodara-Ahmedabad, Chennai-Bangalore-Coimbatore and Howrah-Asansol-Patna, for this purpose. The cost of setting up the high-speed corridor between Delhi and Amritsar would come to around Rs 25,000 crore.

The ministry will leverage its surplus land for commercial purposes for setting up these corridors, sources said.

In fact, the proposal to set up high-speed corridors had been made to the Planning Commission by the ministry earlier this year. After receiving green signal from it, the ministry had asked for support from state governments. States like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala had shown interest to participate in the project.

The Gujarat government had even got a feasibility study conducted on the Ahmedabad-Mumbai route by a Japanese agency, around 18 months ago.
With high-speed trains running at 300 km per hour, the travel time between Delhi and Amritsar will be kept at around two hours. Also, the stoppages would not be for more than two to three stations.

The ministry officials say various international studies confirm that high-speed trains are amongst the most fuel-efficient modes of transport, with an annual carbon dioxide emission level of 0.6 tonne.
The whole concept, apart from the aim of providing faster connectivity to satellite cities with the metros, is to promote environmental friendly mode of transport.