Proud achievement for Indian Railways! India is placed among the top countries in world that manufacture their own train sets. Asserting Indian Railways’ ‘Make-in-India’ approach, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has recently said that India is “one amongst only 7 countries in the world which make their own train sets”. Addressing a gathering, Goyal said India is becoming a global power. India has been able to make its own train sets, Goyal said adding that this became possible since the central government is working in “proactive mode as well as in a transparent fashion”.
Goyal stated that India is producing ‘modern trains’ like Vande Bharat Express. “Indian Railways has already started Vande Bharat Express from Delhi to Varanasi. During the Navratras, Indian Railways was hoping to start it from Delhi to Vaishno Devi, Katra too,” Goyal said.
Vande Bharat Express is a semi-high speed engineless train set that has already generated export interest from various countries. Indian Railways is currently working on a plan to manufacture more energy-efficient versions of the Vande Bharat Express in both chair car and sleeper versions. According to the plans, by 2022, 40 such train sets will be ready for the Indian Railways network.
Recently, Piyush Goyal-led Railway Ministry has also taken the decision to replace all conventional ICF-design railway coaches with modern Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) coaches. The Railway Ministry also informed Parliament it has started the process of acquiring technology to produce aluminium body coaches in its Indian Railways factories. A total of 411 pairs of trains are operating with LHB coaches on Indian Railways’ network. From the financial year 2018-19 onwards, the Indian Railways production units are only manufacturing LHB coaches, the Ministry said.
Indian Railways’ Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai is among the largest coach manufacturers in the world. It has the capability of producing passenger coaches, semi high-speed train sets like Vande Bharat Express. Recently, The Modern Coach Factory (MCF), located in Uttar Pradesh’s Raebareli, created a record by manufacturing a total of 554 LHB coaches in the first four months of the current financial year.
Indian Railways is hoping to streamline the coach production process further by corporatising the manufacturing units and merging them under a single entity, the Indian Railway Rolling Stock Company.