Buoyed by the success of the ‘Made in India’ state-of-the-art Vande Bharat Express trains with Chair Cars, the Indian Railways has decided to roll out its ‘Sleeper’ version by March 2025.
The Vande Bharat ‘Sleeper’ train set is likely to have 16 coaches — 11 AC III tier, four AC II tier and one AC I class coaches — that can accommodate 887 passengers as per the initial design prepared by the Chennai-based Integral Coach Factory (ICF), which has been making trains for Indian Railways.
The national transporter is now focusing on introducing a large number of these set of trains in its network.
The newly-launched Vande Bharat trains have recently also come in for special praise from London-based Financial Times. The daily in its article recalled Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech in 2021 when he promised to “connect every corner of the country” with 75 Vande Bharat trains.
“Designed, engineered, and built locally, the train is a showcase project for the “Make in India” industrial policy of Narendra Modi’s nationalist government, which aims to build indigenous capacity in everything from microchips to combat helicopters, using local knowhow and talent while leveraging strategic partnerships with foreign companies.
The train is an exemplar of India’s industrial model, in which it is following a much lower-cost, but arguably more pragmatic version of China’s economic take-off in recent decades, in which building railways played a role,” read the FT article early this month.
To introduce more of the existing version, the Ministry of Railways has floated tenders for 200 trains, to be manufactured at its various units including the ICF that has so far manufactured all the eight Vande Bharat trains in operation including the latest one between Secunderabad and Visakhapatnam, flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.