Antyodaya means uplifting of the weakest sections of the society. With this in mind, Indian Railways has unveiled the Antyodaya Express, a new train for the unreserved passengers.
Antyodaya Express was announced as a part of Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu’s Railway Budget 2016 speech and has been envisioned as a long-distance, fully unreserved, superfast train service that will be operated on dense routes.
This is a long-distance, fully unreserved, superfast train service, for the common man to be operated on dense routes.
The exterior of the new train has been given the colour scheme of red and yellow, with a design around the windows of the coaches.
After being impressed by the vinyl-coated colourful coaches of the Humsafar Express, the Railway Board instructed ICF to put patches of vinyl coating on the exterior of Antyodaya Express.
Antyodaya Express is similar to the Deen Dayalu coaches that Indian Railways had introduced in mid-2016.
The train aims to provide enhanced passenger comfort.
The seats of the Antyodaya Express are more comfortable compared to the general sleeper class ones.
Antyodaya Express boasts of modern amenities such as water purifiers, toilet occupation indication display boards, bio-toilets, fire extinguishers with anti-theft arrangement, cushioned luggage racks with coat hooks, LED lights, more mobile charging points and enhanced capacity dustbins.
The LHB-type (Linke Hofmann Busch) coaches have been manufactured at the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai.
The interior panelling of the coaches has been done with aluminium composite panels, similar to Deen Dayalu.
The first Antyodaya Express is slated to start plying shortly between Mumbai and Tatanagar. Yet another route that has been identified for the new train is between Ernakulam and Howrah.
The fares of the Antyodaya Express will reportedly be around 10-15% higher than the regular rate.
Indian Railways has said that since the manufacturing cost of the Antyodaya Express coaches, with modern facilities, is higher so special higher fares will be applicable.
Indian Railways: Know More- Customer service: 139
- Headquarters: New Delhi
- Number of employees: 1,335,000
- Founded: 16 April 1853
- Revenue: 1.709 trillion INR (2016–2017)
- Parent organization: Ministry of Railways
