The railways plans to bring down travel time of Rajdhani trains on the busy Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes by over three hours with an investment of about Rs 14,000 crore in infrastructure, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal informed Parliament on Wednesday.
Responding to a query in Lok Sabha, Goyal said that two projects for raising of train speed to 160 kilometer per hour (kmph) on existing corridors of New Delhi-Mumbai and New Delhi-Howrah are under consideration at an estimated cost of Rs 13,491.25 crore.
"This will reduce the travel time of premium Rajdhani type trains to 12 hours as against the present travel time of 15 hours 30 minutes for Mumbai Rajdhani and 17 hours for Howrah Rajdhani. No time frame can be indicated at this stage before the projects are approved," he said.
This is one of the 11 proposals prepared by the railways in its 100-day plan, with instructions to initiate immediate action to implement them by August 31.
According to the proposal, the railways has set a target to ramp up the speed of the trains on these routes from the present 130 kmph to 160 kmph in the next four years.
The two routes account for 30 per cent of passenger and 20 per cent of freight traffic.