No, having iron doesn't mean having iron rai which suits the new speed standard. You have to replace at least a part of your rail as they cannot sustain the high speed.
For example, China replaced most of its rail to cop with high speed. The new rail has a weight of 60-70kg/m and 100m length while the old one is 50kg/m and 25m.
<1> We already have heavy rails for freight intensive routes. We are also contemplating heavier rails and higher catenary for double decker container trains.
Stone India Limited has already made a larger pantograph for our locomotives. They are called
Omniversal Intelipanto.
<2> Other than that, the kind of metal alloys we use still has some expansion and contraction. We need to come up with alloys that will have minimal expansion and contraction due to heat and be strong enough and not susceptible to deformation. We also cannot run freight trains on these dedicated high speed routes as freight trains damage tracks.
<3> Also, for high speed trains, we might need to incorporate tilting trains. That will require more spacing between two parallel tracks. The current standards are:
Source:
[IRFCA] Permanent Way - Dimensional Diagrams
Again, no. Your signal system is only working for low speed. With increasing speed, there is a lot of new potential safty problems would appear, so you have to install a lot of new sensors. Meanwhile, high speed means shorter response period and long braking distance, so you have to renew your signal system.
You have good knowledge in this subject. Yes, you are right. We will need to install newer signalling system. I believe we can upgrade the existing ones with the stuff you mentioned.
<4> On tracks turnouts/switches/points:
Also, we used to have multi-piece frogs earlier:
Nowadays, we have monolithic frogs in high speed routes.
These images are for example only.
We need to get frogs with a switching flange to enable further high speed negotiation:
No, you still to provid a proper trainning to upgrade their knowledge and skill as their exsting knowledge doesn't work well in new scenario.
Yes, of course, we need to provide training. What I am saying is that we do not have shortage of skilled and unskilled manpower.