West Bengal to get its first Vande Bharat Express on December 30: 5 facts to know

Kolkata, Dec 26: The new year is expected to bring faster and easier journeys for Kolkatans as West Bengal is expected to get its first Vande Bharat Express train, running from Howrah to New Jalpaiguri on 30 December. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will flag off West Bengal's first Vande Bharat Express on the busy Howrah-New Jalpaiguri route on December 30, a senior Eastern Railway official said. The Prime Minister is also expected to inaugurate a host of projects during his expected visit to the city for a meeting of the National Ganga Council that day.

Here are five facts you need to know about India's first high-speed train.

• Since the launch of the Vande Bharat Express trains in 2019, this will be the seventh Vande Bharat Express overall and the first in eastern India. Vande Bharat trains currently travel on six routes linking Delhi to Varanasi (UP), Ambala/Una (Himachal Pradesh), and Katra (Jammu and Kashmir). Chennai-Mysuru, Mumbai-Gandhinagar and Bilaspur-Nagpur are the other three routes.
• The new superfast train service with modern passenger amenities is expected to bring down the travelling time from Howrah station to New Jalpaiguri to about seven hours and fifty minutes, Eastern Railway spokesperson Ekalabya Chakraborty said. It will run six days in a week, he said.
• The train will leave the Howrah Station at 6 am and reach New Jalpaiguri Station at 1.30 pm, and after a one-hour stopover, it will depart from the north Bengal station at 2.30 pm and arrive at Howrah at 10 pm, Chakraborty said on Sunday.
• The blue and white 16-coach rake has already arrived at the Liluah loco shed of Eastern Railway, he added.
• Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off India's sixth Vande Bharat Express train between Nagpur and Bilaspur, at Nagpur railway station. Vande Bharat 2.0 trains come fitted with the Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) called KAVACH, which the previous trains did not have. Coaches are equipped with disaster lights with a battery backup of three hours. The train's exterior has eight flatform-side cameras, up from four. There is also a passenger-guard communication facility in coaches, which comes with an automatic voice recording feature.