India’s Busiest Rail Corridors, Delhi-Mumbai And Delhi-Kolkata To Be Upgraded In Railways’ Rs 18,000 Crore Plan

An ambitious plan to upgrade the two busiest rail corridors in the country, Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata is to be brought before a cabinet committee by the Railway for clearance, the Finacial Express has reported.

The plan seeks to fence the two routes, along with upgrading tracks and signalling and eliminating unmanned crossings along the courses, and aims to increase the train speeds to 160 km per hour on the routes. The speed can be further increased to 200 km per hour.

Fencing the routes prevents human and animal interference on the tracks and hence is required for a high speed corridor to ensure safety. Fencing the routes is set to cost Rs 2200 crore of the expenditure.

A senior Railway Ministry official said, “The proposal has already been cleared by the extended Railway Board, Niti Aayog and the Finance Ministry. Now it awaits Cabinet clearance — after which the project will commence”. The cabinet is expected to go through the plan next month.

The Delhi-Mumbai corridor and the Delhi-Howrah corridors are 1384 km and 1450 km in length, and the upgrade is set to cost Rs 7,000 crore and Rs 11,000 crore respectively.

Network congestion is a huge issue in freight movement in India and the Railways is already constructing a dedicated goods corridor to ease the traffic. Since taking over as the Railways Minister, Piyush Goyal has instituted a push for improving existing railways infrastructure.