The main goal under public transport emergency evacuation planning and management is to ensure timely and safe evacuation of passengers from transport facilities including vehicles. Practical experiments are difficult to conduct as they involve risk to people as well as it is difficult to evoke conditions pertaining to emergency evacuation. In that case, modelling through simulation can be a good alternative. In this study the effectiveness of vehicle designs under emergency situations are evaluated for double decker train coaches introduced by Indian Railways. In this study simulation of passenger movement in emergency and smoke dispersions are modelled using Pathfinder® and Pyrosim®. Through simulations this study is able to develop the matrix for required safe egress time and the available safe egress time for various conditions. It is observed that the time required for all the passengers to evacuate under normal conditions is less as compared to the time they will need to evacuate under emergency conditions. This can be due to the crowding and herding that is observed at the exit doors. It is found that factors like door width, number of doors and their position and passenger heterogeneity has a significant impact on the total evacuation time.