Which city in India will have the first Rail Auto hub?

A common-user finished-vehicle rail hub is a railway freight terminal purpose-built to let automakers load newly manufactured cars directly onto railway rakes near a manufacturing cluster instead of moving them by road, cutting logistics cost and letting Indian Railways compete for finished-vehicle freight.

Under Indian Railways' 2016 push to move more finished vehicles by rail, the country's first such hub was commissioned at Walajabad in the Kancheepuram district near Chennai in March 2016. Located close to the Renault-Nissan, Hyundai and Ford plants and to the ports of Chennai and Ennore, the roughly 5,000 sq. m. facility can load about 300 vehicles per rake and park close to 5,000 cars at a time, cutting OEM logistics costs by an estimated 20-25%.

Why not the other cities:

• Mumbai handles general and container rail freight, but was not the site of this dedicated finished-vehicle hub.

• Guwahati is the Northeast Frontier Railway's principal junction for general and parcel freight, unconnected to this initiative.

• Varanasi's rail investment in this period centred on passenger and heritage-circuit connectivity, not vehicle logistics.

So Chennai (Walajabad) is the city that got India's first rail auto hub.