Indian Railways: Divided By Zones, United By Railfans - Karthik

Per capita income of India is many times lesser than the per capita income of other countries where HSTs are successfully operating. Since the paying power of avg Indian is much lower, it is necessary to keep fares of HST travel as low as possible. Very important factors for the financial viability of the HSTs from Indian perspective are:
(1) Maximisation of Non-fare revenue through development of commercial properties at Rly stations, development of commercial/ Residential/ industrial/ business/ educational hubs enroute the HST track, advertisement, attracting high-value lightweight freight like jewellery etc, which should be equal to the fare generated by selling tickets
(2) Maximisation...
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of the number of passengers and fare-revenue is necessary which can be done by proper packaging of the trainsets like:
** bring down the cost per seat by maximizing the number of seats per coach through innovative coach layouts & designs like double-decker coaches.
** To attract passengers from other modes of transport, facilities like online entertainment, comfortable seats, etc should be provided.
** HSTs should cater to attract Middle Classpax in significant numbers, and should be the preferred mode of travel for Upper-Middle Class & Upper Class passengers. Proper mix of such economy seats, standard class seat(similar to normal ACC), business class (similar to Exe.CC) is required. Also the possibility of luxury class coaches with very high fare in very limited numbers need to be explored to attract the Very Rich class.
** maximize the number of passengers by attracting onward journey passengers. This can be done by giving connectivity of dedicated trains on conventional network & of dedicated luxury buses for specific destinations to the paxs of HST trains. For ex. Ahmedabad to Mumbai by HST and connecting luxury bus from Mumbai Rly stn to Pune/Mahabaleshwar/Nashik-Trymbakeshwar etc Delhi to Varanasi by HST and onward Semi High Speed BG train to Gaya-Dhanbad-Asansol-Durgapur-Howrah/Patna/Ranchi etc