Inching closer to realise the dream of fast-tracking railways upto a speed of 200 km per hour, the Indian Railways on Tuesday partnered with the Czech Railways. Both the countries signed a memorandum of understanding for potential cooperation areas in enhancing the railway infrastructure.
A senior railway official said that the partners will work on logistics of automotive transport, passenger operations like raising of speeds upto 200 kmph, infrastructure building and management, station development and workshop modernisation, information and communication technologies especially for passenger amenities and modernisation of rolling stock, signalling & telecom besides improving upon freight operations.
In his March 2013 visit to India, Czech Trade Minister Martin Kuba had offered his country’s expertise in setting up high-speed rail corridors. The country had announced that they were looking for three corridors between Delhi and Kolkata, Delhi and Hyderabad and Delhi and Mumbai and Pune where Czech companies would be building and supplying technologies for the railway corridors-carriages, locomotives and signalling systems
The MoU was signed between the Ministry of Railways and Czech Railways (Ceske Drahy) of the Czech Republic and Association of Czech Railway Industry (ACRI) of the Czech Republic on Technical Cooperation in the field of railway sector by Chairman Railway Board Arunendra Kumar and Ambassador of Czech Republic Miloslav Stasek.
The official said that the MoU will be valid for a period of three years which can be extended further for successive periods of one year at a time. Also present on the occasion were Member (Staff) A K Mittal, Member (Traffic) DP Pande, Member (Engineering) VK Gupta, Commercial Counsellor of Czech Republic Jiri Janicek and several other top officials from both the side.