Prime Minister Narendra Modi will flag off two Vande Bharat Express trains on 7 July from Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.
While the proposed Chennai-Vijayawada Vande Bharat has been withdrawn from the schedule, Gorakhpur-Ayodhya-Lucknow Vande Bharat Express and Jodhpur-Sabarmati Vande Bharat Express will be launched, according to the Indian Railways.
All these Vande Bharat trains are eight-coach each.
According to the traffic projection, the Chennai-Vijaywada route is expected not to have high demand of passengers as is required for the Vande Bharat service.
Vande Bharat Express draws maximum energy because of its high acceleration and deceleration rate. The semi-high speed train also gets path priority on the route as compared to other mail/express trains.
According to the earlier plan, Vande Bharat service was proposed for Chennai-Tirupati route in anticipation of pilgrim rush for Tirumala. However, later on it was changed to Vijayawada as there was already a Vande Bharat service from Secunderabad.
But considering the number of wait list passengers for various trains in the route it was felt that the demand is not very high at the moment.
However, introduction of the Vande Bharat some time later cannot be ruled out, the Railways maintains.
The Railways recently launched five Vande Bharat trains on 27 June. However barring Ranchi-Patna, all four services — Goa-Mumbai, Bhopal-Indore, Bhopal-Jabalpur and Bangalore-Dharwad are having low occupancy rate since the launch of these trains which is a cause of worry for the Railways.
With the launching of these two trains on 7 July, the Railways will be operationalising 50 Vande Bharat services till now, as against the target of 75 by 15 August this year.
The Railways has plans for manufacturing 400 Vande Bharat trains in the next four years. Besides Vande Bharat Express, the Railways is also manufacturing Vande Metro trains for local journey and non-AC Vande Sadharan trains for common man.