The Tale of Talgo & Surge Pricing in the Indian Railways
- In Economics
- 10:40 PM, Sep 15, 2016
- Raghuram Amperayani
In the 163 year old History of Indian Railways never has one witnessed the railways undergoing reforms at such a tremendous pace as has happened over the last two years. Much emphasis has been given on customer satisfaction by providing newer travel options & amenities, expanding rail network, building significant presence in Northeast and the border regions and exploring various options to increase the average speed of the trains.
While Indian Railways is known worldwide for its carrying capacity and impressively long rakes, the standard fit is 24 coaches for most of the long distance trains which translates to 518 meters to 535 meters in length, not including the locomotives and bankers (at gradient), meaning that the speed remained compromised.
Since late 90’s efforts have been undertaken by various governments to visit this issue. The challenge is more difficult due to the existing infrastructure combined with the supersaturation of main lines.
The Shatabdi’ s came, then Duronto’s and so on & so forth, the most recent being the Gatiman express. The conventional ICF coaches made way in certain premium trains and popular trains for the Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) coaches. The LHB coaches are the passenger compartments of Indian Railways that have been developed by Linke-Hofmann-Busch of Germany (renamed Alstom LHB GmbH in 1998 after the takeover by Alstom) and produced by Rail Coach Factory in Kapurthala, India.
Not long ago a Shatabdi was planned to be introduced between Mumbai & Madgaon on the completion of 150 years of Indian Railways. It was meant to complete the journey between 5 to 6 hours at 150kmph and yes that’s the same time that we are now trying to match today. With the LHB coaches the test was deemed to be sucessful as the train averaged 150kmph over a 400 km distance between Madgaon and Roha (near Mumbai) in 2003. However the terrain of Konkan Railways and major derailments, landslides during the same year along with the limitation of single track meant ensured that the realization of a high speed train plan remained a distant dream and the project was shelved due to safety considerations.
While realizing that the 200 kmph with LHB rakes is certainly possible however there are certain caveats. Firstly, the braking system of LHB and the loco has to be significantly upgraded to Magnetic braking system from the air brake technology in order to reduce braking distances. Then the coupler strength, especially at curves poses a significant hazard. Further the LHB coaches are made of Stainless steel which makes it heavier than technologically more advanced under trial Talgo coaches which are made up of aluminum.
Ideally, for High speed operation, the thumb rule would be to first upgrade the tracks & close down all grade intersections, but that would mean putting more burden on the current rail finances. That is something the Modi government is looking at when India would see first Bullet train to roll out in the next decade, but the fact remains that it is more likely limited to cover select cities which are essentially economic hubs in India.
In the interim the great Indian 'jugaadu' system comes in which lets us address the problem in hand with the current resources available. Thus enters the Spanish Talgo Renfe.
Why Talgo?
Talgo trains are best known for their unconventional articulated railway passenger car that uses a type similar to the Jacobs bogie that Talgo patented in late 40’s. The Talgo coaches can work on different gauges too (broad gauge & standard gauge etc.), which makes them highly adaptable. The wheels are mounted in pairs but not joined by an axle and the bogies are shared between coaches rather than underneath individual coaches. Wheels are independently installed and suspended and the suspension goes right up to the roof which in turn is supported by a column. As a result, the wheels can rotate at different speeds.
The Talgo coaches are shorter in length, & have only 4 wheels (in place of the usual 8). The shorter coach length means shorter wheelbase which when clubbed with the short height reduces the centre of gravity thus allowing these coaches to take turns at higher speed with less swaying. For a given coach length, coaches with the Talgo style of bogies tend to have a higher center throw (basically the center part of the coach describes a larger curve at turnings) than coaches with conventional bogie arrangement. As the coaches are not mounted directly onto wheel bogies, the coaches are more easily insulated from track noise.
The presence of all these features is what made Indian Railways to go for Talgo in the first place & hopefully see Talgo build its coaches and technology in India.
One of the best performing ministers of Modi Sarkar, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has been relentlessly pursuing multiple options to build a robust Rail infrastructure. He recently said that the ultimate goal is to make the train travel between two parts of India to less than 12 hours. He was quoted as saying at the International Conference on Technology for Ultra-High-Speed Rolling Stock that “Talgo is very keen to manufacture in India; which would give impetus to PM Modi’s Make in India dream.”
The Talgo coaches were shipped from Spain to Mumbai at the company’s expense and, hence the cost incurred by the railways was negligible.
The Talgo Trials:
Talgo became the fastest train to run in India, clocking a speed of 180 km per hour, covering the 84-km stretch between Mathura to Palwal in 38 minutes, breaking the record set by the Gatimaan express in April this July.
Subsequently the Talgo was put to test on one of the busiest routes the New Delhi-Mumbai route. The Talgo that covered the Delhi-Mumbai route had nine coaches, comprising two executive coaches, four general coaches, a cafeteria, power car and tail-end coach.The initial trials were hampered due to point failure at Mathura along with heavy rains, water-logging at Vapi section followed by track washout in Gujarat. Despite this the Talgo produced an on par performance with the King on Western Railways the 12951 Rajdhani Express and completed the journey in approximately 16 hours.
During the first trial run between Delhi and Mumbai on August 2, the train took 15 hours and 50 minutes to reach the destination, as against the expected 12 hours and 47 minutes. However from Delhi to Surat, Talgo covered the distance in around 2 hours less in comparison to Rajdhani Express. The average running speed of the Talgo train between the New Delhi to Surat was 106.52 kmph as compared to Rajdhani’ s average speed of 89.76 kmph on that particular stretch.
In the second trial run on August 5, while the claim was 12.47 hours, it took 13.17 hours to reach the destination. The trials were done at a speed of 130 kmph. The train got delayed by 19 minutes as against its scheduled travel time because of signaling problem near Vapi.
During the third trial on August 9, the train took 12.56 hours, compared to a claim of 12.26 hours by the company.
After a gap of close to 3 weeks the last trial of Talgo’s train held on September 10th/11th was sucessful being conducted at a maximum speed of 150 kmph. It was successful in achieving its targeted time of completing the journey in just less than 12 hours. The train left Delhi at 2:45 pm yesterday and reached Mumbai this morning at 2:34 am. This leads us to believe that the dawn of a new era in passenger transportation for Indian Railways is about to begin finally. The full-fledged use of Talgo coaches is likely to start sometime late 2018 or early 2019, once local production commences after customization and modifying it make them operational for Indian platforms.
Questions remain on whether the existing Talgo would be upgraded to the 18 rakes which is the current composition in Russian market or whether the 9 rake composition is here to stay. It remains to be seen that if 18 rakes is recommended whether it would require significant P way upgrades along the main line.
Surge Pricing Saga:
The current state of Indian Railways is more or less attributed to series of populist measures that successive governments committed during pre-polls stage. For electoral gains the emphasis on the infrastructure & safety was compromised. Whatever budget allocation was assigned most of it went towards introduction of new trains on already congested routes; more stoppages meaning even the fastest of the trains had a compromised average speed. The subsidization of passenger services, Indian Railways bore a loss of Rs 33,490 on coaching services. The current cost per passenger per km is at 73 paise and railways recover only around 36 paise from the passenger. The Rail enterprise had been running on cross subsidization of the passenger traffic segment by the freight traffic segment meaning that the freight business was steadily losing ground to the roadways. One cannot continue to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Having a Chartered Accountant at the helm of affairs is always a blessing for an enterprise as big as the Indian Railways. Railway Minister Mr Suresh Prabhu has been dynamic in his actions and it’s now safe to say that he has been at his innovative best to look for alternate ways to boost up the revenues.
Without impacting the common man the Railways has decided to experiment with the concept of surge pricing of tickets wherein the prices of the tickets rise with the proportionate decrement in the availability of the seats. To be fair it is to be noted that the surge pricing was introduced in early 2014 in Rajdhani and currently in the Suvidha express.
While the 2014 model had some flaws it remains to be seen if those issues have been addressed upon & the dynamic pricing it as sucessful as seen in the Suvidha express. The base fares will increase by 10 per cent with every 10 per cent of berths sold subject to a prescribed ceiling limit at a maximum of 50 percent, depending on the demand and the surge fares are proposed to be capped at 1.5 X the base fare. There will be no change in the existing fare for 1AC and EC class of travel.
The flex-fare which came into effect from September 9th onwards had already seen 50,000 tickets booked till date.
While the usual suspects who are responsible for the current state of affairs have been vocal & critical about the flexi-fares, they fail to understand that this flex-fare was applicable only to the Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duronto and Premium class trains.
The flexi-fare can be considered as a primer and a sort of conditioning of the traveler’s psyche and bring them out of the notion and make them aware that for having world class facilities the passenger in turn needs to understand that there would be a certain price to pay .With the Talgo likely to take shape of a Tejas or a Humsafar it is likely that these trains would be bit pricier than the Shatabdi, Rajdhani & Durontos.
The Ministry of Railways was very proactive and before the opposition could go for the jugular, they pinned them on to the mat by taking to the social media and rolled out series of tweets to make the general public aware of the concept of surge pricing and to what extent it affects them.
One example was that in the SCR region the premier trains share was at 0.7% and it would impact only 1.4% of the total passenger count. Overall it covers a mere 142 trains of the total 12,500 trains that ply across the length & breadth of the country and just 1.5 lakh passengers of the total 2.3 crore passengers who travel daily meaning that it affects only 0.65% of the passenger count.
Similarly one needs to understand that the surge pricing surcharge is not in addition to the tatkal fare. However with the surge pricing coming into effect the hike should be justified only if these trains are given precedence in terms of amenities and speed.
With Suresh Prabhu in charge the Acche Din for Indian Railways is now not a dream anymore. With much desired changes visible at the ground level in terms of newer amenities and responding to the passenger needs, there remains little doubt that Mr Prabhu has been by far the best and the benchmark he is setting would be very hard to beat by his successor(s) anytime soon.
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