Vande Bharat Express is the name accorded to the semi-high speed trains operated by the Indian Railways. These trains use a distributed power system for powering the train. Two sets of the train are in operation presently. The Indian Railways has placed and order for 44 train sets comprising 16 coaches each on the Integral Coach Factory.

The new train sets would be an improvement over the existing train sets. Firstly they will be built as sets of four coaches which can be disconnected from the train set. Four such sets would make a train set. This has been done to improve availability of the trains and to ease maintenance. Such an arrangement would allow defective sets to be replaced without affecting the availability of the train. Such a facility does not exist in the present rakes and hence a fault in one of the coaches renders the entire train unavailable.

The new train sets would be provided with light weight lithium-iron-phosphate batteries specified to provide back up for duration of 3 hours. These trains would be fully air conditioned. The coaches would be installed with state of the art aluminium body roof mounted packaged unit (RMPU) type air-conditioning units with thermal comfort based Microprocessor controller.

The new Vande Bharat Express would be powered by  25000 V single phase 50 Hz OHE system which is designed to be 87% efficient. The trains can reach a top speed of 160 Km/h, accelerating to this speed in 140 seconds and thus saving 20% from the journey time. All the electrical and propulsion equipment are suitable for flooding conditions while the train interiors are designed to meet fire safety as per EN 45545 HL2 and improved electrical protection and safety with a well-defined protection scheme for High Voltage roof cable, Automatic fire detection and alarm.

Vande Bharat Expresses are short distance trains which can be cover the entire journey time during day time. Hence these trains would have only chair car seating. They would have auto plug doors, retracting foot rests, automatic intercommunication doors, LED lighting for seats and diffused lighting for luggage racks.

Advertisement