Railways floats a tender for 58 new Vande Bharat trains
The Indian Railways has floated a tender for the production of 58 new Vande Bharat trains, and it aims to roll out 75 such trains by August 23 next year, people aware of the developments said on Saturday.
“With the tender for 44 Vande Bharat rakes earlier this year and the 58 new rakes, we will have 102 Vande Bharat trains ready by 2024,” a railway ministry official said on condition of anonymity. HT has reviewed a copy of the tender.
The move comes in the backdrop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day announcement on rolling out 75 new Vande Bharat Express trains that will be launched to connect different parts of the country in 75 weeks to mark the ongoing “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”. These trains will be manufactured at the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai; Modern Coach Factory, Rae Bareilly; and Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala.
The closing date for the tender is October 20, 2021. A pre-bid meeting will be held on September 21, with cut-off date for submission of pre-bid queries on September 14, an official said,
asking not to be named.
The tender, floated on August 28, invited bids for the design, development, manufacture, integration and testing of traction propulsion electrics for the manufacture of 58 rakes of Vande Bharat trains.
The Railways in September last year floated a revised tender for procuring 44 semi-high speed Vande Bharat trains mandating 75% domestic components, making it a domestic tender. HT on August 20 reported the next lot of Vande Bharat rakes with upgraded amenities as well as better seating, security, and surveillance systems is expected to be commercially available from June 2022 onwards. “The first prototype rake is tentatively planned to be dispatched in March 2022, which will be put to commercial service tentatively by June 2022,” another senior official said.
Some of the new amenities and safety features planned to be added include four emergency windows for easy evacuation of passengers; disaster lights in all coaches, to be used in the event of failure of all other lights in a disaster situation; and more emergency push buttons (four per coach).
The coaches will also have a centralised coach monitoring system for all electrical, climate control, and other vital functions. An important upgrade in the new coaches will be a “pushback arrangement” for better reclining of seats. In the first two rakes of the Vande Bharat trains, issues regarding the seating comfort level were raised.
PM Modi flagged off the maiden run of a Vande Bharat train on the New Delhi-varanasi route on February 15, 2019. The second such train service between New Delhi and Shri Mata Vaishnodevi Katra was flagged off by Union home minister Amit Shah on October 3 that year.