Indian Railways: Kalka-Shimla Toy Train to get new coaches, improved speed

Indian Railways: Kalka-Shimla toy train to get new coaches, improved speed to give passengers a comfortable train travel experience, reports PTI.

Kalka-Shimla toy train

Planning a trip to Shimla in near future? Here’s some good news for you! To give passengers a more comfortable toy train experience, the Indian Railways will be replacing British-era coaches with the new swanky ones in the next 10 months. Rail Coach Factory in Punjab's Kapurthala is in the process of manufacturing around 30 coaches which will be on the tracks late next year. The new coaches will be based on LHB technology with stainless steel. Lightweight shells are being designed with large windows and a glass vista dome on the roof. The new coaches will undergo two trails to test structure stability. 

"The process will be time-consuming as they will have to undergo two trials. First will be with only the shell and bogie to test them for structural stability and then when it gets approved, a final trial will be initiated," an official said.

The Kalka-Shimla route boasts of toy trains like the Kalka-Shimla passenger, Shivalik Express, Kalka-Shimla Express, Himalayan Queen, and Rail Motor. Around 20 stations are covered on this route and the trains navigate through around 900 curves. There are three other narrow-gauge routes where toy trains run are in Darjeeling, Pathankot, and Ooty.

Further, the Railway authorities have ambitious plans to bump up the speed of the historic Kalka Shimla toy train to cut the journey time by two hours. It has been put on the back burner, sources said. According to them, steep curves, gradients, and lack of lateral space are making it technically impossible to make the toy train run any faster.

At the request of the Himachal Pradesh government, the railways have over the last two years conducted studies if the toy train can be run at an increased speed. In 2018, the Northern Railway got the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) to assess if the speed of the Kalka-Shimla toy train could be increased.

"It is a very difficult project. The curvature is more and the efforts to straighten it have failed due to a lack of lateral space. It is not technically feasible. A final decision is yet to be taken after the RDSO study is completed. However, it seems unlikely that the speed of the toy train can be increased beyond a point," said an official.

One of the reasons for this is that the cost incurred to make the changes suitable for a faster running toy train does not justify the gain in speed of barely 3 to 4 km per hour. However, an official reply from the Railways on the status of the project is awaited. "As of now, the project is on the back burner," a source said.

Officials also highlight the limitations presented by the terrain, with 62 landslides being experienced in this calendar year itself. Around 90 percent of the track is full of curvatures with the sharpest being 24 degrees, sources said. "It is because of the slow speed (of the train) that no mishap has happened on the route," an official said.

At present, the speed of the train is 22-25 kmph and the plan is to increase it to 30-35 kmph. The slow-moving toy train on a narrow-gauge rail route was awarded Unesco's world heritage site status 10 years ago.

(With inputs from PTI)