All Vande Bharat Express Trains

The Vande Bharat Express is the fastest category of train most Indian travellers will ever board, and the only one built as a single self-propelled unit rather than coaches dragged by a locomotive. Power is distributed along the rake, which is why it accelerates to 100 km/h in about 52 seconds and why it can hold a high average speed on routes full of curves and halts.

The table below lists every Vande Bharat service we have seen in the reservation system, in both directions, with the distance each one covers and the average speed it actually achieves end to end. Average speed is worth more than the headline maximum here: it is the number that decides whether the train beats a flight once you count the airport.

On speed: the figures in the table are average speeds across the whole journey, halts included, worked out from the published schedule. Sanctioned for 160 km/h and tested beyond 180 km/h, but limited to 130 km/h on most sections because the track, not the train, is the constraint.

The train entered service on 15 February 2019 between New Delhi and Varanasi, having been designed and built at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai in about eighteen months. It was known through development simply as Train 18, for the financial year it was meant to appear in, and was renamed Vande Bharat shortly before launch.

What made it unusual was not the speed but the engineering choice behind it. Every other premium Indian train is a locomotive pulling passive coaches. Vande Bharat is an electric multiple unit: traction motors sit under the coaches themselves, spread through the rake. That removes the locomotive changeover, cuts the turnaround at terminals to minutes, and lets the driver work from either end.

From two rakes in 2019 the fleet has grown into the largest premium category on the network, and it now reaches every zone. Most services are chair-car day trains built around a same-day return, replacing the role Shatabdi held for thirty years, and a number of the routes here are ones no fast train served before.

Accommodation is Chair Car and Executive Chair Car, both fully air-conditioned, with reclining seats, onboard catering built into the fare, automatic sliding doors and a sealed gangway between coaches. Executive class on some rakes has rotating seats that can be turned to face the direction of travel.

A Vande Bharat averaging around 80 km/h over a whole journey is running well, and the fastest on this list sit above that. The 160 km/h stretches are short and specific — the Delhi to Agra section is the best known — so the column below is a fair measure of the service, not a disappointing one.

Vacant seats?

See which berths fall empty on these trains once the reservation chart is prepared.

Full schedule

Station-by-station timings, halts and running days for any train in this list.