Vande Bharat sleeper coach debut at IREE 2025 highlights innovation and safety

New Delhi: While design is often a free-form creative process, practicality always wins out when it comes to train travel. Designers working on India’s high-speed Vande Bharat sleeper coach are focused on ensuring passenger comfort, convenience, and safety.

A mock-up of the upcoming sleeper coach was unveiled on Wednesday by Kinet, an Indo-Russian joint venture, at the International Railway Equipment Exhibition (IREE) 2025 being held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi.

Design focused on passenger comfort

Chief Designer of the Vande Bharat Project, Evgeny Maslov, said. ‘’In design the sketch is very important because it's how nice design is done. The first phase in our design process is to understand the passenger. It's a real discussion on what he needs. Also, for Indian Railways it is important to understand the cultural background. We have to understand what kind of colours, patterns and special scenarios a passenger needs. And, only after that, we start doing, let's say...the beauty-ness of the trains,” Maslov explained.

While Project Director Nishunk Garg,, highlighted The most important part is the comfort of our passengers. How comfort can be provided to our customers – that is the most important and prominent thing for us to deliver. By keeping that view in our eye, we design the different designs of the berths and the different designs of the ladders. How can the elderly people and the slightly overweight people easily go on to the upper berths? And that is how people actually always have the fear, and they generally try to avoid the upper berth. And that is the discomfort we have worked upon. And which is going to be converted into comfort and that is how we are driving it,” he said.

With passenger comfort as a top concern, the coach's interior material selection was crucial to its design.

Eco-friendly materials for sustainable travel

"Today, we present only a concept... what we call Design Vision because this is a journey. And, we have to use in our future only ecologically clean material. We have to provide Indian-produced materials. And we also have to understand here what we can do with new technologies,” Maslov added.

Safety remains another major focus. The new sleeper coaches will feature anti-climbing technology, improved braking systems, and jerk-free rides.

“Safety will be jerk-free and anti-climbing. The braking system is much better. It is certainly one level of technology more than what we have been experiencing so far. So, it is going to be a very, very safe train.

Reaffirming this, Garg added, “Our families are going to travel on these trains. We are not designing these safe trains for different people. We are designing these safe trains for our own people. Safety is the most prominent part of designing our product.”

The International Railway Equipment Exhibition 2025, hosted by the Ministry of Railways and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), runs from October 15 to 17.