Not making this up, i was just trying to get new details about HSR and ended up watching Siddharth's interview with Shubhranshu, ex-CAO of VB Project, topic is on HSRs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFx-KyutDQM[embed]

Holy shit this interview if the things being told are correct then HSR would be in some serious issues, tldr;

A HSR or any train infra needs three major things

>Civil infra (viaducts, track, etc.)

>Signaling

>Trainsets.

We have made great progress in 1. Civil Infra.

But issue is now with signaling and trainsets. So according to the clause of the loan we needed to import the Shinkansen trainsets for our HSR which also means the signaling system.

Issue is that japanese qouted the price of almost 1000 crores rupees for a single trainset compared to say like vande bharat which took around 120crores per trainset. Agree that speed difference is there, VB is SHSR and capable upto 200kmph and Shinkansen are 350km but the sheer difference in cost forced GOI to reconsider the indigenous solution -> hence the order for BEML 250kmph trainsets.

Railway has also given order to siemens for 350kmph capable ETCS Level 2 signaling system. Which is cause of a big confusion now.

Remember those recent news of 'free trainsets' by japan? it was because they wanted to vendor lock-in India. So even if the trainset was free, the signaling system needed to be DS-ETC used by Shinkansen which means no other trainset for our HSR only japanese import (Even if we have our own hsr trainset we would need japanese consultancy).

But we didn't get anything worthwhile from that news.

Which means as things stand today,

>BEML HSR trainset, capable of 250kmph average and 280kmph top speed, will arrive atleast 2 years after the beginning of the process (september 2025) which is most likely in 2027.

>India is going with ETCS Level 2 signaling system, which means no matter what we say, shinkansen trainsets are not coming to MAHSR atleast till 2030.

This means till 2030 we will have just BEML trainsets running. So entire infra which is capable of 350kmph will have two trainsets (maybe more later) doing 250kmph journey.

This coincides with the rumors of E10 which is not coming anytime soon, timeline is 2030s for that trainset.

This is brutal but this seems to the most accurate description of future. Damn. Someone post it on r/indianrailways and r/transitindia with the title "Shinkansen trainsets might not be coming to Mumbai-Ahmedabad HSR"