Amazon expands rail tie-up, launches Western DFC operations

Amazon India expanded its rail freight partnership with Indian Railways on 18 August 2026, becoming the first e-commerce company to operate on the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor's inaugural Joint Parcel Product-Rapid Cargo Service train, after Dr Manoj Singh, Member (Operations and Business Development) at the Railway Board, launched the scheduled, end-to-end rail parcel service at New Dadri Railway Station, in the presence of DFCCIL Managing Director Praveen Kumar and other senior railway and DFCCIL officials, ahead of the festive season.

The JPP-RCS connects New Dadri in Uttar Pradesh with New Motidau in Gujarat's Mehsana district and New Ancheli in Navsari, covering roughly 1,200 kilometres. The outbound service began on 18 August, with the return leg from New Ancheli to New Dadri commencing on 20 August, and the corridor will operate daily thereafter, catering to e-commerce, FMCG, retail cargo, courier and logistics aggregators, transporters and bulk parcel customers.

For Amazon specifically, the daily service will run with over ten van parcels, connecting its network across Delhi, Ahmedabad and Surat, with onward connectivity to Pune, Mumbai and Goa. The expansion, carried out jointly with DFCCIL, shifts shipments from surface transportation to rail, strengthening Amazon's multimodal transportation network across northern and western India. Abhinav Singh, Vice President of Operations at Amazon India, said the Western DFC expansion further scaled the company's multimodal network ahead of the festive season, with Amazon now using over 140 trains across 130 intercity routes to connect more than 100 cities.

This latest expansion builds on a formal partnership that began in 2019, when Amazon became the first Indian e-commerce company to run an express rail transportation solution, carrying parcel wagons on the Rajdhani Express between Mumbai and Delhi. Amazon and the Ministry of Railways later signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly develop a hub-and-spoke model for one origin-destination pair, covering first and last-mile requirements, transit times, cost options and policy enablers to scale up rail parcel volumes across the network. Over that period, Amazon scaled its rail operations from a single train in 2019 to more than 120 trains across 130 intercity routes and 91 destination cities by 2024, a 15-times increase in the volume of parcels it moved by rail. In 2023, Amazon also became the first e-commerce logistics company to use India's Dedicated Freight Corridors, designed to decongest the existing rail network, raise average freight train speeds, enable heavy-haul operations, and link ports and industrial areas for faster freight movement.

DFCCIL has described the JPP-RCS as an integrated rail-and-road logistics solution covering the entire movement of goods from origin to destination, including collection from customers by aggregators, loading and unloading, rail transportation on a fixed timetable, and last-mile delivery, with parcel space bookable up to 180 days in advance through the corporation's Virtual Aggregation Platform. The service is expected to generate close to twenty-one lakh rupees per round trip, with an estimated annual revenue potential of around seventy-six crore rupees once operations stabilise.