Distributed Power EMUs for overnight LD Service on Indian Railways

[jis]

Indian Railways has received bids from seven consortia in response to their worldwide tender asking for 16 and 20 car distributed power EMU sets for use in their Rajdhani and Shatabdi Express premium service.

http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/main-line/seven-consortia-in-race-for-ir-emu-order.html?channel=524&utm_source=WhatCounts+Publicaster+Edition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=RGN+8.24.15&utm_content=Seven+consortia+in+race+for+IR+EMU+order

This will primarily provide enhanced acceleration and deceleration performance, and later all to be sped up to 200kph (125mph) from 130koh (81mph) as track and signaling infrastructure is progressively enhanced. Initially better operating performance and some amount of upto 145kph (90mph) operation will yield upto 3 hours of saving in running time reducing the end to end time for the 900 miles or so Delhi - Kolkata run down to around 14 hours from 17 hours.

Currently it departs each end at around 5pm, arriving at the other end at around 10am. With the reduced running time it will be able to leave at 6pm or so and arrive at the other end at 8am or so.

Can you imagine the LSL departing NYP at 6pm or so and arriving in CHI at 7am or so (taking into account the time zone change?)

Incidentally, the contract would involve a very large build in India component and a technology transfer component for further manufacture in India. At the rate India deploys new equipment, it is not inconceivable that something like 25 or more trainsets per year for many years to come would become the norm for derivative designs.

 

[Bob Dylan]

Impressive!

Maybe Amtrak's Management needs to take a trip to India to get some ideas and tips on how to pull this off here,!

I know India has much more political support for Passenger Rail than we do, but we could do a much better job of lobbying and information sharing to get the badly needed new equipment flowing!

 

[cirdan]

jls, that link appears to go to something unconnected.

What is India Railways' policy towards EMUs? I understand they use large numbers of them on commuter services around the major cities. But I had the impression LD trains are still largely all locomotive + stock. It is surprising they should start the EMU revolution on sleeper trains rather than day trains.

 

[jis]

jls, that link appears to go to something unconnected.

What is India Railways' policy towards EMUs? I understand they use large numbers of them on commuter services around the major cities. But I had the impression LD trains are still largely all locomotive + stock. It is surprising they should start the EMU revolution on sleeper trains rather than day trains.

Ooops sorry. it is now fixed.

IR uses what they call EMUs is suburban service where the platform faces are further back from the rails since these suburban EMUs are extra wide, and they would not fit through the loading gauge of main line stations outside of the suburban areas.

On main lines they have started using mainline compatible loading gauge EMUs. what they call MEMUs (Mainline EMUs) for providing stopping service extensively in electrified areas outside of suburban areas, though there are a lot of loco hauled stopping service trains too. MEMU service is generally seen as an upgrade in service since they tend to be capable of maintaining much tighter schedules than loco hauled service.

The EMUs that they are ordering are both for Sleeper (Rajdhani) and Day (Shatabdi) trains - basically trains targeted to run at 160kph to 200kph. I presume that they will also be applied to Duronto and even Garib Rath class trains eventually. This is part of a push for 200kph. For the train lengths they have, they already need to use Co-Co WAP-7 class electrics to get the tractive effort necessary. The results are still unsatisfactory and the Co-Co trucks are not considered to be desirable beyond 160kph because of the damage that the Co-Co trucks do to the track, and even now the Bo-Bo WAP-5s that they have, simply do not have enough traction to pull 20 car trains with quick acceleration that they desire. Hence the move to distributed power EMUs.

The higher speed premium expresses are challenged to keep the schedule in the face of considerable adverse signals due to congestion. When it takes 7kms and 4 minutes to accelerate again to full speed it makes things even more challenging. It is this last piece that they are trying to fix, and there is no easy way to fix it with loco hauled stock.

This is actually a major organizational upheaval that comes with it, since now the power department cannot be neatly separated from the commercial department at the coupler between the train consist and the locomotive. They will have to create completely new maintenance and management setup for higher speed service akin to what they have for suburban EMU service. It is going to be interesting to watch. but this certainly starts moving IR on very solid ground for providing higher speed higher quality service across the board as they manage to deploy this new setup.