The Mysuru-Chennai Vande Bharat train, the first in south India and the fifth in the nation, will be officially opened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The semi-high-speed railway will take six hours and thirty minutes to travel the 500 kilometres between the two cities in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
At the Bengaluru railway station, Modi will signal the departure of the maiden train at 10:25. On Saturday, the usual train service will start. It will stop in Bengaluru and Katpadi and travel at a typical pace of about 76 kmph.
On Monday, the railways tested the sixth rake of the Vande Bharat Express between Chennai Central and Mysuru via Bengaluru.
In February 2019, the first Vande Bharat Express train between New Delhi and Kanpur, Allahabad, and Varanasi was signalled to depart. The fourth Vande Bharat train between Delhi and Una, Himachal Pradesh, began service last month. On September 30, a third such train was signalled from Gandhinagar to Mumbai.