Indian Railways on Thursday said that the sleeper version of the Vande Bharat Express train has achieved a peak speed of 180 km per hour in multiple trials in the last three days. Indian Railways also said that the trials will continue until the end of this month before this world-class long-distance train is made available to rail commuters across the nation.
Union Minister of Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw on X shared a video of a successful trial in Kota Division and mentioned speed in his post.
The video shows a nearly full-to-brim glass of water adjacent to a mobile on a plain surface inside a Vande Bharat sleeper train. The Water level remaining static can be seen in the video as the moving train achieves near constant peak speed of 180 km per hour exhibiting the element of comfort in high-speed rail travel. The post came after 3 days of successful trials, which concluded on 2nd January, in which a Vande Bharat sleeper train in its loaded condition touched the peak speed.
On Thursday, during a 30 km long run between Kota & Laban in Bundi district of Rajasthan, the train reached a peak speed of 180 km/hour. A day earlier, i.e. on the first day of 2025, in a 40 km long trial run between Rohal Khurd to Kota, Vande Bharat sleeper train touched the peak of 180 km per hour. On the same day, peaks of 170 km/hr & 160km/hr were achieved on Kota-Nagda & Rohal Khurd-Chau Mahla sections. These trials will continue for the month of January under the supervision of RDSO, Lucknow.
Once these trials are over, the train will be evaluated by the Railway Safety Commissioner at the maximum speed. Only after passing the final stage, Vande Bharat trains will be officially certified & handed over to Indian Railways for induction & regular service.
Vande Bharat sleeper trains are designed with features like automatic doors, ultra-comfortable berths, on board WiFi & an aircraft-like design. Passengers in India are already enjoying reclining seats and world-class travel experience through 136 Vande Bharat trains running across the country on medium and short distances.
The real challenge for Railways was to add berths & test the trains for full passenger and luggage load conditions in order to convert them into Vande Bharat sleeper coaches while achieving the peak speed of 180 km/ hour. With these successful trials, rail commuters can hope for world-class travel experience in long-distance travel like Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Delhi to Mumbai, Howrah to Chennai and many other routes also. They will benefit as travel time will come down considerably. The current average speed of Mumbai-Delhi long-distance travel is 90 km/hr with the maximum permissible speed of 140 km/h for Tejas Rajdhani Express, which is the fastest among all Rajdhani train services in India.
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