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Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently flagged off a giant 12000 HP Electric Locomotive, WAG-12. The locomotive is developed under the mighty Make in India initiative in the Electric Locomotive Factory at Madhepura in Bihar, which is a joint venture of French company Alstom(76%) and the Indian Railways(24%). The most powerful electric locomotive prior to WAG-12 was WAG-9, which was 6120 HP, nearly half that of WAG-12. You can imagine how powerful this new locomotive is. The average cost of each WAG-12 locomotive is expected to be around 25 crore Rs.
The WAG-12 is a 3- phase twin section electric freight locomotive, developed mainly for Dedicated Freight Corridors. I will try to write a separate post on the Dedicated Freight Corridors in my coming posts.
 The WAG-12 locomotives are designed to pull freight at much higher speeds than its predecessors. This locomotive will be able to carry as much as 6000 tonnes at a maximum speed of 120 km per hour. This locomotive has Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) based propulsion technology and saves energy too with its advanced Regenerative Braking technology.
 Indian Railways and Alstom will make 800 such locomotives at the Madhepura facility and Alstom will do the maintenance of these locomotives for a time span of 11 years. The planning is to manufacture 35 locomotives in the fiscal year 2019-20, 60 in 2020-21 and 100 locomotives every year from 2021-22. For maintenance purposes, facilities are being set-up in Saharanpur(Uttar Pradesh) and Nagpur(Maharashtra).
‘Passenger trains move the masses, freight trains the economy.’
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