India's First LNG-Powered Train Flagged Off at Sabarmati

India got its first LNG-powered train on 27 September 2026, when Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation Amit Shah sent it off from Sabarmati Railway Station in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. At the same function he dedicated finished works and laid foundation stones for new ones, together costing Rs 1,472 crore. Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel was present.

What Sabarmati received

• The country's first train running on liquefied natural gas, described as a step for cleaner rail travel.
• A WAG-12 maintenance shed for locomotive upkeep, built at a cost of Rs 700 crore.
• The Kavach train protection system on the Sabarmati-Kalol-Sabarmati section, costing Rs 48 crore.
• A start on Kavach for the Ahmedabad-Palanpur and Ahmedabad-Samakhiali sections, and on doubling the Sabarmati-Sarkhej line.

The new locomotive

A twin-section engine of 12,000 horsepower was put into service the same day. The minister said a single such machine hauls a load that would otherwise fill about 600 trucks, and that two locomotives used to be coupled for the same work.

Railway figures quoted at the event

Electrification was only 30 per cent before 2014, he said, and the last 0.4 per cent of the network will be covered shortly. A corridor of 11,000 kilometres is being turned into a four-lane network to ease movement towards Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Guwahati. He also reported a successful trial of the first long-haul double-stack container train from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai to Vadodara, which he expects to roughly double freight capacity. For comparison he placed electrification at 92 per cent in China, 68 per cent in Spain, 60 per cent in France and 49 per cent in the United Kingdom, naming Sweden as the lone country at 100 per cent while noting its network is far shorter than India's. Gujarat's rail spending across 2009 to 2014, he added, came to Rs 589 crore in all.