[vishnugupta]

> when and how Indian Railways will incorporate high speed rail

So there are two parallel efforts going on.

High speed bullet trains[1]. These require building everything from scratch, tracks, stations and so on. When fully operational, it will be a truly new experience for Indians and hope will boost economy and benefit common man.

The second one[2] is upgrading existing tracks and coaches to be run at a higher speed (I guess around ~150KM/h). This will also have an added benefit of upgrading existing infrastructure such as signalling, crossings, tracks etc., Given the sheer size and complexity of Indian Railways IMO this will have more benefits as it'll improve the overall running times, utilisation and such.

Indian Railways is a life line of millions of people as they rely on it for daily wages. And as far as complex systems to very few come close to it. Until very recently they still relied on manual token exchange mechanism[3]. During one of train station visits my father drew my attention to token exchange and explained how it worked. Truly awesome.

I'm glad to see it on the front page of HN; more people need to know about it.

[1] https://www.nhsrcl.in/en/home

[2] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/102-vande-...

[3] https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/Ball...

[einpoklum]

I can understand why you might need new tracks for bullet trains (old ones not perfectly level and aligned, quality of materials, friction properties, whatever).

But why would you have to build new _stations_ for them?

[kalleboo]

You need new tracks as in completely different right of way. Bullet trains need very straight tracks, existing tracks are too curved and at high speeds you'd fly off in the corners (tilting trains exist but have limitations). And if you're building new track, there are no existing stations to reuse.

[DocTomoe]

Generally, when you go the high-speed route, you have lines that are a lot longer than slower, more local lines. You do not want stations along the way to be terminus-style stations, where you'd

1. have to switch out the driver position from one end of the train to another end to just leave the station again and

2. have a series of track switches which may malfunction (which ironically is a challenge even for highly industrialised countries like Germany), and it

3. means more and slower track to be maintained.

If you set up a bullet train program, you want speed, and these problems kill the speed advantage. The solution is to build a new station in which the train can just pass through.

[jonp888]

If the train has to leave the high speed line on the outskirts of the city and run at slow speed it wastes a lot of time.