Indian Railways to launch Train 19, the sleeper version of Train 18

Integral Coach Factory (ICF), a firm that makes railway coaches, is planning on developing Train 19 which will be a sleeper version of Train 18. Also known as the Vande Bharat Express, Train 18 is the inspiration behind Train 19.
According to Rajesh Agarwal, Member (Rolling Stock), Railway Board, the ICF is planning to launch 40 Vande Bharat Express train sets. These will be provided with the driver cabin crash guard with an aluminium design. He also said that there are some Southeast Asian and South American countries that have shown interest in importing such coaches. But for now, they will only be working for the Indian Railways.

The Vande Bharat Express or Train 18 is India’s first engine-less semi-high speed train. The train recently touched 1 lakh kilometres mark and proved its technical excellence. Mr. Agrawal mentioned that this year ICF will take up design, development and production of Train 19. It is to be noted that in the last financial year, ICF came out as the world's largest railway coach producer by manufacturing 3262 coaches.
This year, he hopes to touch the number of 4000 coaches. As far as finance is concerned, Mr. Agarwal said that INR 2500 crore infrastructure improvement projects are being planned for coach production units of Indian Railways. From this amount, INR 500 crore are likely to be spent for ICF.

ICF is planning to roll out 12 rakes of air-conditioned trains. For this, a rail coach factory is being prepared at Lattur in Maharashtra. Before this, the 60000th coach, which is a self-propelled inspection car, was flagged off from ICF.

The coaches of Train 19 would be like Train 18’s that features aerodynamically designed driver cabins at both ends. For equal distribution of power and faster acceleration/deceleration, the train boasts of alternate motorised coaches. Besides, there is a regenerative braking system which is a power saver and inter-connected.

The semi-high speed train also has Wi-Fi connection, automatic doors with retractable footsteps and GPS-based passenger information system. In addition, there are disabled-friendly toilets, CCTVs among other facilities.