City-Chennai bullet train inching closer

The Bullet Train, which is part of the High Speed Rail project connecting Bengaluru and Chennai with a link to Mysore, is inching closer to reality. In the coming budget, the central government is constituting a nine-member High Speed Rail Board to execute the project.

The Railway Ministry appointed consultants last year to take up the pre-feasibility study on the six proposed routes, including the Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulam-Thiruvananthapuram. The pre-feasibilty study will be tabled in Parliament and the final feasibility study will begin in April.

“A pre-feasibility study has been conducted on the six select corridors. In the Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulam-Thiruvananthapuram stretch, there is a plan to either include Mysore in the main route or to create a branch line to that city. A final decision will be taken only after the feasibility study,” said Vinay Kumar, Executive Director (Planning), Railway Board. These trains are capable of running up to 250 to 300 km per hour and will be extended to eight more corridors. “These projects will take over five years for completion, depending on how and when the work starts. We have had both Japanese and French companies showing interest in the project,” he added.

The project is expected to find the much-needed push once the bill on the formation of Board is cleared in Parliament. The board will have a chairman and eight members. “Bengaluru will get the Bullet Train. We have formulated a bill to form a special board only for the High Speed Rail project. Once that is cleared, the other works related to the project too will be hastened,” said K.H. Muniyappa, Union Minister of State for Railways. The six routes under the project are: Delhi-Chandigarh-Amritsar; Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad; Hyderabad-Dornakal-Vijaywada-Chennai; Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulam-Thiruvananthapuram; Howrah-Haldia and Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi