Another bunch of express trains, this time in the area around Aligarh Jn. Somna is a few stations towards Delhi and Daud Khan is the first station towards Kolkata from Aligarh.
One thing worth noticing in the more recent videos is that all LHB equipped trains and most ICF Coach equipped trains are now running at 130-135kph. There has been an across the board increase in base MPS to 130-135kph. The next step is rumored to 140-145kph. The LHB rolling stock and the passenger locomotives as they exist today are capable of operating at 160kph, and can be easily upgraded to 200kph. It is the tracks and control systems that will need time to upgrade. For example, anything above 130-135kph has to await deployment of the Kavach system which is equivalent of ACSES or I-ETMS in the US and ERTMS L2 in Europe.
The other thing worth noticing is that several Rajdhani Expresses now carry one or two Parcel Vans tacked onto their tail, which are based on LHB cars, so are capable of full passenger speeds. This has proved to be a good source of additional revenue for high priority parcels traffic. Things like Produce including Fish are shipped across the country this way, especially on the one nighter Rajdhanis.
A few additional rail-nerdy things to notice in those videos:
1. For each train its speed is shown, addition to its name (origine) and destination.
2. The locomotive type, including subtype (e.g. WAP-7i HOG) is mentioned. The i denotes that it is IGBT technology. HOG means it can provide Head On Generation hotel power.
3. The shed where the locomotive is homed is mentioned e.g. Howrah WAP-7 or Ghaziabad WAP-5 etc.
4. If it is "off-link" that is mentioned, which means that it is not a normal assignment. Sometimes you will find locomotives from sheds far away pinch hitting e.g. a Royapuram (Chennai) locomotive on a train from New Delhi to Guwahati in far Northeast. This happens because locomotives run through the entire route of the train, so a lot of Royapuram locomotives land up in New Delhi or Hazrat Nizamuddin running sheds. Then if there is a loco out of service in a normal link to Guwahati, whatever is ready to go is assigned off link. Eventually of course they find their way back to the home shed before it is time for POH.
