Hydrogen passenger trains were supposed to be Germany’s thing. The Coradia iLint kicked off the modern era back in 2018, ran around Lower Saxony for a few years, and then quietly imploded. Alstom pulled most of its Coradia iLint fleet out of service in late 2024 for urgent rework, and by August 2025, only four of the 14 units in Lower Saxony were still running, with diesel filling the gap.<\/p>\n
Apparently nobody told India. On Friday, June 26, the country’s first indigenously built hydrogen train left Jind station in Haryana and clocked 120 km\/h on the Jind-Sonipat corridor, clearing the last engineering hurdle before it can carry actual paying passengers.<\/p>\n
That final speed test is the one that matters. Low-speed trials had already been signed off, but until you push the thing to its target ceiling and watch how the brakes, the oscillation behavior and the fuel cell stack hold up at speed, regulators won’t let you sell tickets on it. This trial focused on emergency braking distance and oscillation, the two things that decide whether a rolling pressurized hydrogen tank is fit to share a platform with commuters.<\/p>\n
The run happened on the Jind-Sonipat section under Northern Railway, with a specialized unit from the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO), Lucknow on site to oversee the test. RDSO is the body that has to bless every component on Indian Railways before it sees revenue service, so its presence at Jind wasn’t ceremonial. It was the gate.<\/p>\n
The trial was originally scheduled for June 24 and slipped two days, which is the kind of detail that gets ignored in press releases but tells you a lot about how cautiously this program is being run.<\/p>\n
The high-speed run let engineers assess the braking system, the engine capacity, the safety systems, the vibration behavior and the track condition all at once. The crew was watching the power car, the controls, the safety features and the speed sensors the entire way.<\/p>\n
Here’s the bit worth flagging: 120 km\/h is the test speed, not the service speed. Indian Railways has already approved this trainset for passenger operations at 75 km\/h<\/a>, which is deliberately conservative. The ministry signed off in May, clearing the 10-coach hydrogen DEMU to run between Jind and Sonipat under Northern Railway. You test high, you operate low. Standard railway logic.<\/p>\n Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has been calling this the world’s longest hydrogen train on broad gauge, and for once the marketing isn’t completely cooked. The trainset is 10 coaches: two driving power cars at the ends and eight passenger coaches in between. The Coradia iLint, the German train that started all of this, runs as a two-car set. Five times shorter, end to end.<\/p>\n That length matters because hydrogen trains have always been a small-vehicle game. Two-car sets, regional branch lines, low-density routes. As we covered when the route was first green-lit<\/a>, the train-set is 10 coaches long.<\/p>\n Two of those are Driving Power Cars (DPCs) rated at 1,200 kW each, which combined push the total output to 2,400 kW. The other eight are passenger coaches. Spreading the power across both ends, instead of dragging everything from a single locomotive, is what makes the longer formation viable on a fuel cell.<\/p>\n The trainset has been badged “Namo Green Rail,” and Vaishnaw has leaned hard on the power numbers: each 1,200 kW power car is, by the ministry’s account, roughly twice as muscular as the fuel cell setups running in Germany and China.<\/p>\n It seats up to 2,600 passengers, and even the onboard air conditioning, lighting and fans run off the hydrogen system. On range, the figure is more modest than the headline power suggests. Officials put it at around 250 km on a single hydrogen fill, which is comfortably more than a Jind-Sonipat round trip ever needs.<\/p>\n This is where the story gets honest. The railcar itself was built at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai, the retrofitted DEMU platform is Indian, and system integration belongs to Medha Servo Drives out of Hyderabad. The Jind hydrogen plant, the electrolyser, the storage and the dispensing rig were all set up domestically. But the fuel cell stack, the actual chemistry that turns hydrogen into electrons, isn’t.<\/p>\n The fuel cell modules came from Canada’s Ballard Power Systems: eight units of 100 kW apiece, according to Ballard’s own announcement of the Medha order<\/a>. Ballard’s stacks are built on proton-exchange membrane technology that India doesn’t manufacture.<\/p>\n That’s the heart of the whole system, and it’s the one major component that isn’t Indian. It’s not unusual, since the global fuel cell supply chain is concentrated in a handful of vendors, but it does mean the long-term reliability of the train depends on hardware India doesn’t currently make.<\/p>\n And the supplier base is wobbling. Cummins spent the better part of a decade building a fuel cell business, then booked roughly $657 million in charges over 15 months winding it down<\/a>, and sold the rail piece to Alstom while citing lower hydrogen adoption expectations.<\/p>\n That’s the same Cummins operation that built the stacks for the Coradia iLint. Which is to say, India is moving into hydrogen rail at exactly the moment Western suppliers are quietly moving out.<\/p>\n Hydrogen trains are only as good as the place that fuels them. You can build the prettiest 10-coach set in the world and it does nothing without a dispenser, a storage farm and a regulator willing to sign off on storing compressed hydrogen next to a passenger platform. Jind got all three.<\/p>\n Indian Railways set up hydrogen production, storage and refuelling infrastructure at Jind specifically to support the project and keep operations safe. The train carries multiple safety systems, including hydrogen leak detectors, flame detection units and continuous monitoring tools.<\/p>\n The Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation has separately issued the license to fill and store compressed hydrogen at the site, which is the regulatory layer most outsiders forget exists.<\/p>\n The route itself, roughly 89 to 90 km between Jind and Sonipat, was picked because it’s a non-electrified Northern Railway branch line. That’s exactly where hydrogen makes economic sense, because the alternative is a diesel locomotive belching particulate into a populated corridor. On a fully electrified mainline, overhead wires win every time.<\/p>\n India is now in a strange position. Germany, the country that wrote the playbook, is walking back. Lower Saxony deployed 14 Coradia iLint units on the Cuxhaven-Buxtehude line, and by August 2025 only four were still running as fuel cell module shortages forced operator EVB back onto its diesel backup.<\/p>\n The regional authority that ordered them has since called tenders for battery-electric trains instead<\/a>. Japan’s FV-E991 has been on the Tsurumi Line since 2022 but never scaled. China’s CRRC unit is still in test operations. The United States has the Stadler FLIRT H2 on Metrolink’s Arrow line in California<\/a>, in service since September 2025 as the first hydrogen passenger train cleared under US Federal Railroad Administration rules.<\/p>\n Meanwhile India just ran a longer, more powerful trainset to 120 km\/h on a corridor with a domestically built hydrogen plant feeding it. Whether that’s a smart bet or a stubborn one depends on how the Ballard stacks hold up over the next three years, because fuel cell degradation, not the railcar, is what pulled the German fleet off the tracks in the first place.<\/p>\n The next step is the paperwork. The ministry’s approval doesn’t mean the train starts carrying passengers tomorrow; Northern Railway still has to submit compliance reports against the conditions laid down by RDSO, the Commissioner of Railway Safety and other statutory bodies. The 120 km\/h test cleared the engineering side.<\/p>\n The compliance file clears the legal side. After that, the Namo Green Rail starts carrying commuters between Jind and Sonipat at 75 km\/h, and India gets to find out whether it can run a hydrogen fleet better than the country that invented one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" India’s first hydrogen train hit 120 km\/h in its final speed trial on the Jind-Sonipat line, clearing the last engineering test before revenue service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":12587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry","category-energy","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11989"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12588,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions\/12588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The “world’s longest hydrogen train” claim, unpacked<\/h2>\n
How indigenous is “indigenous”?<\/h2>\n
The infrastructure piece nobody screenshots<\/h2>\n
Where this leaves the global hydrogen rail club<\/h2>\n