Perhaps Flyertalk is not the most appropriate venue for this question, but I have done a search here, consulted the Indian Railways site, IndiaMike, Seat61.com, et al and cannot find what I am looking for.

For travel among these major cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai is there absolutely no train service with private compartment and private bath (and A/C of course).

The best I can find is "AC 1" where 72 passengers share 4 bathrooms!

The luxury trains (Deccan Odyssey, Golden Chariot, etc) do not fit my needs because they are fixed itinerary sightseeing tours.

I will be traveling to/in India on business and would like to keep things as relaxed as humanly possible. This means not fighting it out at both outbound and inbound airports on local flights.

I am not looking for a lot of luxury -- I do the Madrid-Paris (Goya) overnight train on older cars, but perfectly clean with private cabin, shower and toilet, and very decent dining car.

Does nothing like this exist for India among major destinations?

Thanks!

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Private shower on a train? I don't think you will find it.

if you give me a list of cities you want to go to, i can try to help you out....it would be best if you also told me which route you are looking to take (eg delhi to mumbai or delhi to calcutta)....

There is nothing like that on Indian Railways. Quite honestly the train stations require just as much, if not more, fighting than the airports and reward you with a 16 hour or longer journey on most of the legs you are looking, food cabin and "amenities" of a most uncertain quality.

On the plus side the train is cheaper, but not terribly so in AC1. Fly.

Agree with CJ001F. The only time a train makes sense is if its a night journey (9..10 hours) or a short day trip (4..6 hours), and it'd be almost as long to fly (drive to the airport, checkin, collect bags etc).

Whew! Okayyyy....

Not the answer I was looking for but very useful nevertheless.

Sounds like it is fly or hitchhike.

Thanks to all!

While I'm no expert on Indian economics, I don't think there'd be the market for such a thing in India. People take the train in part because it is very cheap, and compartments with private facilities would likely not be used by natives. For foreigners, these facilities already exist on the sightseeing trains previously mentioned and flying is cheap, so it wouldn't be worth it to add them to "normal" trains.