Some interesting facts of Indian Railways which you might not aware of.

Indian Railways, the life line of nation which transports million of passengers and millions of ton freight every day, started its first operation on 16th April 1853. Laborers, businessmen, students, holiday makers and all sections of the society rely on railways for short or long journeys. Indian Railways is the one of the largest railway network in the world. The Railway has over 239,281 freight wagons, 59,713 passenger coaches and 9,549 locomotives. In this post we are going to share some interesting facts, data and statics about Indian Railways.

Gatimaan Express is the current fastest train in India which runs on maximum speed of 160 KM per hour. The train covers distance of 188 KM from its origin station Hazrat Nizammudin to its destination Agra Cant in 100 minutes. The earlier time was 130 minutes which the Shatabdi Express would take to cover Delhi and Agra.

Metupalayam Ooty Nilgiri Passenger train is India’s slowest train, which runs at a speed of 10 kmph.

With the platform length of 2,733 feet, the Indian Railways has the longest railway platform at Kharagpur in West Bengal.

Vembanad Rail Bridge in Kerala is the longest rail bridge in India covering a stretch of 4.62 km.

Pir Panjal in J&K is the longest tunnel in India with the length of 11.21 Km. The tunnel connects Jammu region of the state with Kashmir. The tunnel reduces the distance of Banihal and Qazigund by 17 kilometer.

Vivek Express, which runs between Dibrugarh and Kanyakumari, has the longest route in India. It covers 4,286 km in about 82 hours and 30 minutes.

Howrah- Amritsar Express with 115 stops has the record for maximum number of stops by an Express/Mail train.

India’s first sea bridge, the Pamban Bridge is a cantilever bridge on the Palk Strait connecting Rameswaram on Pamban Island in Tamil Nadu.

Adding to Railways accolades, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways attained the World Heritage Status from UNESCO.

Fairy Queen, the oldest functioning steam engine in the world has been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. It has also received the Heritage Award from the International Tourist Bureau, Berlin in March 2000.

The world’s highest rail bridge, Chenab Bridge is being constructed over Chenab river in Jammu & Kashmir.

The Indian Railways website gets close to 12 Lakh hits per minute. Hourly traffic on IRCTC.com is more than annual traffic of some of the most popular Indian websites. It can support almost 5 million threads at one time. But, we’ve got more people than that.

The station with the longest name is Venkatanarasimharajuvaripeta. And it’s sometimes spelled with ‘Sri’ prefixed. Quite a mouthful.

The station with the smallest name is called ‘IB ’: It’s in Odisha.

Most unreliable train in Indian Railways is Guwahati-Trivandrum Express. It is late on an average by ten to twelve hours. Gosh!

The shortest distance covered by a train between two successive stations is 3 kilometers. Scheduled services between Nagpur and Ajni stations situated just 3km from each other – primarily meant for crew to travel from Nagpur station to the workshop at Ajni.

A train covers a distance of 528 km without a single stop. It’s Trivandrum – H. Nizamuddin Rajdhani Express.

Busiest station : Lucknow, with 64 trains per day.

Bathinda in Punjab is the biggest railway junction in India with 8 routes passing through it.
These were some interesting facts about Indian Railways. We often do train journeys so keeping ourselves updates with these facts will definitely recall the facts once you travel through any of above locations.