Indian Railways: ICF To Design Sleeper Version Of Vande Bharat Train; Chair Car Restricted To 75 Rakes

Shifting the gear, the Railways has asked the ICF to design Sleeper version of Vande Bharat train restricting the manufacturing of Chair Car version to 75 rakes.

Currently, the ICF has an order for manufacturing 117 Vande Bharat trains out of which six have already been rolled out and seventh is slated to be flagged off on 30 December from Howrah.

Stepping up the efforts to ramp up the manufacturing of  the semi-high speed Vande Bharat train, the Railways has written to the ICF: "Against the present orders, only 75 Vande-Bharat rakes to be manufactured as Chair Car version and balance rakes to be manufactured as Sleeper Version."

The Sleeper design will have three toilets instead of two and the capacity of water tanks need to be increased as compared to the existing ones.

Besides, the Sleeper berths would be designed for the trainsets which will be different from the existing Sleeper design of Mail/Express trains.  

While all Vande Bharat trains are now running with seating capacity on day-long journeys, Sleeper are expected to carry passengers for overnight journeys.

At the moment all Vande Bharat trains with seating arrangement are to run on Shatabdi destinations, Sleeper versions are expected to run on Rajdhani routes including Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes.

While the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced manufacturing of 400 Vande Bharat trains in the last budget, this time also she is expected to announce 300-400 more Vande Bharat trains taking the total number of such trainsets to nearly 1,000.

As per the plan, Vande Bharat trains would run parallel to all Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Duronto services besides replacing all Mail/Express trains in a phased manner.

Subsequently all Mail/Express trains would replace local and suburban trains gradually in the long run as the Railways plan to improve train service with upgraded facilities.

Also Read: How Indian Railways Is Tackling Infrastructure Woes To Improve Speed of Vande Bharat Trains