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Journalism of Courage
Putting a question mark over the proposed alignment of the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) along existing tracks over a distance of 2,762 km, officials of the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd (DFCCIL) have pointed out to the Railway Board that the task appears to be enormous if not impossible.
For this, they have said, the Indian Railways will need to negotiate 3,407 bridges, roughly a bridge every 0.9 km. Not just that, trying to accommodate the DFC parallel to the existing route means that the Railways will need 12 years to extend just the 3,041 minor bridges on the Eastern and Western routes.
Bringing out the enormity of the task, DFCCIL officials are learnt to have suggested that planning the DFC alongside existing alignments — as proposed by RITES — will not only mean longer construction periods but also a lot of inconvenience to passenger trains, resulting in longer travel times due to imposition of speed restrictions. It would also mean largescale dismantling, relocation and curtailment of passenger facilities and disruption of traffic.
According to DFCCIL’s internal reports submitted to Rail Bhavan, the Eastern and Western corridors have 366 important and major bridges and 3,041 minor bridges. In case the Railways agrees to the alignment proposed by RITES, speed restrictions will need to be imposed to dismantle various portions of the minor bridges, the DFCCIL officials said. “Technically speaking, there are no problems which cannot be overcome. Construction of bridges is not an issue since we do not want to come very close to the existing alignment,” DFCCIL’s managing director V K Kaul said on Saturday.
“Earlier, what was being envisaged included extension of the existing minor bridges so as to accommodate the new DFC line. That would have lengthened the overall period of construction and also forced speed restrictions on existing lines. Taking this aspect into consideration we are now going away from the existing alignment as much as possible to ensure there is no ripple effect on the existing lines,” Kaul added, saying that route alignments spread over 300 km had already been frozen and the rest was likely to be frozen in 3-4 months. DFCCIL has further pointed out that for operational reasons, all existing level crossings would need to be replaced by Road Over Bridges (ROBs). For this, as many as 906 ROBs, 529 on the Western Corridor and 377 on the Eastern Corridor, would need to be constructed and that would involve about 28 per cent of the total cost of the project. In addition, the existing ROBs would need to be rebuild so as to increase their height by 2.2 metres to provide extra clearance area for double or triple stacked trains.
