Train journey from Mumbai to Pune may soon be reduced to just two hours

Pune junction (Image: Flickr)

The Vande Bharat Express trials have left railway authorities highly impressed and similar trial runs are set to start in Mumbai soon. Railway board members have acquired one AC and one non-AC rake already.

If the new semi-high-speed rakes really function as planned, they will also reduce travel time between Pune and Mumbai by almost half, just like it reduced travel time between Varanasi and Delhi by 40 percent.

The upgraded MEMU services are being touted to be run on routes from Mumbai-Pune, Nashik, and Vadodara. This means, the time taken to traverse 192 km would plummet to barely two hours, as opposed to 3 hours 15 minutes – the time taken to travel by the Deccan Queen.

The railway authorities are mulling over a 160 km/hour top speed at the moment.

Speaking on the move to replicate Vande Bharat type services, Rajesh Agarwal, ex-officio Secretary to the Government of India, said: “We are going to start trial runs from the next week on the Vande-Bharat pattern. One AC-EMU rake and one non-AC MEMU rake will be given to the Central and Western Railways. If the trial goes as per plan, we can reduce the travel time between Mumbai to Pune and Nashik to within two hours.”

The plan has been very well received by the people, especially since the weekend commute between the two cities is very common.

The only impediment in the trial run of the project right now is rail traffic, said a report by DNA. Due to immense congestion, trains can only pick up a maximum speed of 100 km/hour currently.

During the trial runs, the rail authority plans to run the trains at 100 km/hr speed at first and gradually move to a speed of 160 km/hr.