Vande Bharat maker praises hygienic food, criticises frills, low occupancy

Train 18 architect Sudhanshu Mani rode a Vande Bharat train for the first time, praising its exterior, interiors and food but criticising low occupancy, cost-cutting in fittings, and “unnecessary” frills. He said the train remains “more hype than reality” without a sleeper variant

New Delhi: Seven years after the first Vande Bharat train was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019, Sudhanshu Mani, the man who led the production of the country’s first indigenous semi-high-speed train, recently got an opportunity to travel on it as a passenger.

Mani, who boarded the train at Lucknow’s Charbagh station for Prayagraj, described his experience as a mixed one. While he appreciated the exterior look, the cleanliness inside the Executive Class and the hygienic food, he also complained of poor occupancy and the “unnecessary” red carpeting on the coach floor.

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“The exterior looked largely the same as what we built. Maybe a little wavier on the sidewall skins, but still better than most Indian trains,” Mani said in a blogpost.

“The Executive Class coach was reasonably clean, though marred by an unnecessary red carpet strip that felt like a disguise for what should have been confidently displayed,” he added.

Talking about the seating comfort, he said the seats were more comfortable than the prototype — with a back-recline mechanism replacing the earlier slide-forward system.

“The toilet was neat and functional, though the fittings bore the unmistakable fingerprints of cost-cutting and multi-sourcing, the eternal curse of our procurement system,” Mani said.

“The ride quality was good, though not perceptibly enhanced from the prototype as has been claimed unnecessarily. The acceleration remains a key USP due to the train’s distributed power system, as it was in the prototype,” he mentioned.

Praising the interiors as “pleasant”, Mani found the food quality “hygienic and reasonably palatable”. However, the poor passenger turnout disappointed him.

“Occupancy was, frankly, poor — Executive Class hovering below 25 per cent, Chair Car barely at half capacity,” Mani said.

“We had predicted this long ago: without a sleeper variant, the day-train model was bound to struggle on routes where the extent of clientele would simply not justify the glamour,” he said, while pitching for an early launch of the sleeper version.

Explaining the reason for the seven-year delay in taking his first ride on a Vande Bharat train, Mani said, “I had resolved that this ride would happen organically and not as a planned exercise.” “My business and other travels typically take me frequently to Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, even Indore, Kochi, Bhubaneswar and Thiruvananthapuram, but none of these are ideal train journeys from my city, Lucknow,” he added.

“Someday, perhaps, the much-awaited sleeper version of Vande Bharat will make such travel rational and comfortable, but for now, that remains a train more in hype than reality,” Mani said, taking a dig at the Railway Ministry for missing multiple launch deadlines for the Vande Bharat sleeper version.

The maker of the Vande Bharat trains also seemed unhappy with the Indian Railways operating the train below its maximum speed. “Even Delhi feels too long for a day journey at the current permissible running speed of 130 kmph, even though the train is capable of 160,” he said.

In 2018, Mani travelled in the test run of the prototype Train 18, which was christened as Vande Bharat. He served as the general manager of the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai and retired on December 31, 2018, after a 38-year career with the railways.