The Jind–Sonipat corridor in Haryana will be the proving ground for an indigenous hydrogen train that outmuscles every hydrogen rail system operating anywhere in the world.
When the conversation turns to hydrogen trains, three names come up reliably: Germany's Coradia iLint, which entered regular passenger service in 2022; the UK's HydroFLEX; and — more recently — the narrow-gauge hydrogen trains Stadler built for Sardinia. These are the benchmarks. Their fuel cells produce between 500 and 600 kilowatts.
India's first indigenous hydrogen train is rated at 1,200 kW.
That is not a typo.
What Indian Railways is building
The train, which is expected to begin pilot operations on the Jind–Sonipat corridor in Haryana in the second half of 2026, is a ten-coach consist: eight passenger cars and two driver cars. It can carry over 2,600 passengers. That makes it the world's longest hydrogen train — not just by coach count, but by passenger capacity.
The 90-kilometre route has six stops and takes approximately one hour to complete. Ticket prices are expected to fall between ₹5 and ₹25, keeping it accessible to the commuters for whom it is designed — people who currently travel the Jind–Sonipat section on diesel multiple units, a journey that produces emissions and carries the freight of an ageing fleet.
The maximum operating speed is 75 km/h, which is not headline-grabbing by high-speed rail standards but is entirely appropriate for a regional commuter corridor. The engineering priority here is not speed. It is the fuel system.
The infrastructure behind the train
Hydrogen trains are only as good as their refuelling infrastructure, and this is where many hydrogen rail projects in other countries have stumbled. The UK's HydroFLEX has remained a prototype partly because building a hydrogen supply chain from scratch, at the scale needed for regular passenger service, is genuinely difficult.
India has dealt with this directly. A hydrogen storage and refuelling facility has been established at Jind — the originating station for the pilot service — and the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation (PESO) has already granted the necessary licence for storage and dispensing. The refuelling chain is not a promise. It is a licensed facility.
The fuel cell technology generates electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. The only emission is water vapour. For a country where Indian Railways is still managing the final kilometres of its 99.6% broad-gauge electrification programme, a zero-emission train that does not require overhead wire infrastructure is a meaningful alternative for routes where electrification is difficult or uneconomical.
Why this matters beyond Haryana
India still operates several hundred route-kilometres of diesel-worked lines: hill railways, branch lines, heritage corridors, and sections where terrain makes electrification costly. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the Kalka–Shimla line, and the Matheran Hill Railway are three of the most famous — all narrow gauge, all diesel-dependent, all UNESCO World Heritage sites where overhead wires would be visually and structurally intrusive.
Hydrogen is not the solution for all of these. But a proven, indigenously built hydrogen train — one that has been tested in passenger service conditions, not just on a test track — changes the conversation about what is technically and economically viable for India's more remote railways.
The Jind–Sonipat pilot is modest in scope by design. That is the point. You do not prove a technology by building its most ambitious version first. You build the version that can actually run, collect the data, and expand from there.
Germany did this with the iLint. Italy has just done it with narrow-gauge trains in Sardinia. India is doing it on a 90-kilometre corridor in Haryana, with a fuel cell twice as powerful as anything Europe has put in regular service.
Bengaluru, which is working through the metro expansions of Phase 2 and Phase 3 while managing road congestion that grows faster than infrastructure can keep up, is not on this particular route. But the principle — prove the technology at regional scale, then think about what comes next — is one that applies everywhere rail is being built or rebuilt in India.