Vande Bharat

I took Vande Bharat Express from Solapur, my home city, to Pune, a nearby metropolis, on 26th March 2023. This was a special occasion for me as these luxury, high-speed trains were launched only a month ago. They cut down around 25-50% of travel time of an average train journey. This blog is my journey experience jot down in few paragraphs. This is also my first public blog.

A brief context

I am originally from Solapur, Maharashtra, located in the western India. Once a bustling industrial city, ranked third in Maharashtra only after Mumbai and Pune, it has now lost its past glamour and is now a simple city with a population of around 1.5 million. The city is still highly relevant in the modern era as, geographically, it sits in the midst of some of India's largest cities such as Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai. It has a huge potential of becoming a tier-1 city in the future bridging state of Maharashtra (and possibly Gujarat) with the South India.

My experience traveling with Vande Bharat

The look and feel of the coaches is pretty impressive. The catering service is amazing. First, I had a tea and few digestive cookies. Later, they offered us a bellyful of breakfast -- pohe, puri bhaji, mango pickle, diet chiwda, chocopie, mango juice and dahi.

As for the train-wide announcements and automatically opening doors, they were not new to me since I use Delhi metro regularly. Nonetheless, where I was sitting, there was an excitement about how these things work. We did have a laugh at a few grammatical mistakes in the Marathi announcements.

Occupancy was great. The bogey in which I was travelling, it was full. The statistics from Central Railway also confirm the trend. Apparently, the occupancy is about 84% for Solapur-Mumbai-Solapur route and is steadily increasing. In present era, nobody minds spending 1000-1500 Rupees to travel faster.

I saw kids, youngsters and adults clicking photos and videos of the train, both inside as well as outside. Villages in my district like the ones in Karmala taluka, people were struck by the beauty and the agility of this beast. Seemed like some folks were waiting for the train to arrive so that they could watch her majestic run.

Overall, I loved travelling with this train. I would recommend people to make a journey to Solapur on Vande Bharat from Mumbai or Pune. My suggestion would be to plan out a weekend trip with family and visit nearby holy places like Akkalkot, Pandharpur, Tuljapur and Ganagapur.

And now... the prequel of the story

Solapur had an operating flight connecting to Mumbai run by Kingfisher Airlines, before it went bankrupt. Few years went by and when new players came in to continue operating flights, they found illegal constructions around airport which made it unsafe to fly planes at the existing airport. It elongated into a decade long no-fly blockade, the infamous chimney is considered the symbol of which. The city has seen multiple mayors and commissioners (P. Siva Sankar being the most notable), but nobody has been able to get the airport running. Therefore, finally a request for high speed train was made to Indian government and Vande Bharat is the result of that. So, does it completely circumvent our need for a operational flight? The answer unfortunately is NO, because reaching Mumbai still takes 6.5 hours which could be covered in just 30-40 minutes by an aeroplane. We are waiting for "The Chosen One" to solve this blockade, because our "chosen ones" have not solved it so far :).