Vande Bharat (trainset)
The Vande Bharat trainset (), formerly known as Train 18, is an Indian Electric multiple unit chair car trainset designed and developed by Indian Railways at its Integral Coach Factory in Chennai. The train achieved a maximum speed of during its trial runs but the operational speed of the train is restricted to due to tracks' inability to support such speeds. History Dawn of EMUs The first electric multiple unit (EMU) technology in India was introduced in Mumbai as a suburban railway service on 3 February 1925. With an increase in demand post-independence, India began to import EMUs from Europe and Japan, before it could manufacture indigenously. In the 1960s, BHEL, an Indian public sector giant started manufacturing electrical equipment for indigenous EMUs, which then started entering service in the 1960s. During the same time, Integral Coach Factory of Chennai, a government-owned manufacturer of rail coaches started developing EMUs indigenously. This is seen as a major leap in the Indian railway industry as they became the earliest precursors to Vande Bharat technology. By the 1990s, Indian Railways had a large number of EMU trainsets within the cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai as a suburban railway for very short