The Southern Railways is now home to the highest number of Vande Bharat trains — despite standing fourth in terms of route kilometres — after Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off nine semi-high speed trains on Sunday.
At present, there are 34 trains operating across the zones in Indian Railways. The northern zone, which has the largest route kilometres, is second in terms of Vande Bharat with four dedicated trains, Railway Ministry data shows.
Further, Western and North Western zones, that are next in line at second and third position route kilometres respectively, have three Vande Bharat each. The Central Railways also operates three Vande Bharats.
At least five zones have two Vande Bharat each — East Central Railway (ECR), South Central Railway (SCR), West Central Railway (WCR), South Eastern Railway (SER) and East Coast Railway (ECoR). South Western Railway (SWR), Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR), North Eastern Railway (NER), South East Central Railway (SECR) and Eastern Railway are operating one Vande Bharat each.
Of the six Vande Bharat Express trains for the Southern Zone, four are from Chennai for Tirunelveli, Coimbatore, Mysuru and Vijayawada. The other two Vande Bharat trains are operational in Kerala between Kasaragod and Thiruvananthapuram.
The four Vande Bharats allocated to the Northern Zone operate from Delhi for Dehradun, Amb Andaura, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra and Varanasi. Two more trains are operational from Delhi — one for Ajmer (operated by NWR) and the other for Bhopal (WCR-managed). Delhi is the only city that has six dedicated Vande Bharat trains.
The WCR operates two Vande Bharat trains. Apart from Delhi-Bhopal, it also manages Bhopal-Jabalpur Vande Bharat. The NWR, which operated Delhi-Ajmer Vande Bharat, also runs two more trains — Jodhpur-Sabarmati and Udaipur-Jaipur Vande Bharat.
Apart from Chennai, two more cities that have four dedicated Vande Bharat trains — Howrah and Mumbai.
The Central Railways operates three Vande Bharat trains and all are from Mumbai — for Madgaon, Sainagar Shirdi and Solapur. Another Vande Bharat running between Mumbai and Gandhinagar in Gujarat is operated by Western Railways. The Western zone also operates the Ahmedabad-Jamnagar and Indore-Bhopal Vande Bharats.
There are four trains from Howrah operated by three different zones. SER operates two Vande Bharat trains and both of these are from Howrah — one for Puri and another for Ranchi. Further, the Patna-Howrah train is operated by ECR, while the eastern zone operates the Howrah-New Jalpaiguri Vande Bharat. Another train operated by the ECR is between Patna and Ranchi.
The newly inaugurated Hyderabad-Bengaluru Vande Bharat is operated by the South Central Railway, along with the Secunderabad-Tirupati train.
Another Vande Bharat originating from Secunderabad is for Visakhapatnam. It is managed by the East Coast Railway, along with the newly inaugurated Rourkela-Puri Vande Bharat.
Among the zones that operate just one Vande Bhart trains are NER (Gorakhpur-Lucknow); NFR (New Jalpaiguri-Guwahati); SECR (Bilaspur-Nagpur); and SWR (Bangalore-Dharwad).
So far, in this financial year, a total of 24 Vande Bharat trains have been inaugurated.
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