The Union Railway Minister Mallikarjun M Kharge on October 29 formally launched the High Speed Rail Corporation of India (HSRC), a subsidiary of Rail Vikas Nigam (RVNL) in Delhi. He also revealed the logo of HSRC that has been designed by National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
The Minister, while inaugurating a two day international technical conference on 'High Speed Rail Travel; Low Cost Solution,' said that the focus of the conference is to consider achieving higher speed trains in the range of 160 to 200 kmph with marginal inputs in the existing infrastructure, besides given the financial constraints and issues related to land acquisition and track fencing, as an interim step.
Indian Railways is the largest passenger Railway in the world. A natural aspiration of people of this country is that Indian Railways provide them high speed rail travel. Kharge said that most countries consider high speed capability to be in the range of 250 to 300 kmph which requires a dedicated track with fencing and can be prohibitively costly.
For a country like India, track fencing also has its own set of associated issues. Thus, leveraging Rolling stock technologies may provide a lower cost solution to meet the immediate needs of achieving speeds of 160 to 200 kmph and that too on the existing track.
For speeds above 200 kmph the costlier and time consuming solution of providing a separate dedicated track with fencing becomes inescapable, the Minister said.