Railways' Infrastructure Upgrade: New Multi-Modal Corridors To Transform Freight Transport, Here's All About It

The Indian Railways has initiated the survey for four multi-modal lines to complement the Eastern and Western Dedicated Freight Corridors proposed in the Interim Budget 2024-25.

These lines are part of three economic corridors: the energy, mineral, and cement corridor; the port connectivity corridor; and the high traffic density corridor, as per a report by The Hindu Businessline.

The total cost of the Dedicated Freight Corridor, including the Western and Eastern routes and supporting infrastructure such as multi-modal parks and train sidings, is estimated at Rs 1.25 lakh crore.

The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) is fully operational, covering 1,337 km through Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Bihar.

The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC), covering 1,506 km, connects states including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana, with most of it already commissioned.

The WDFC and EDFC will intersect at Khurja in Uttar Pradesh.

The new multi-modal corridors, currently under survey, will add capacity to the existing dedicated freight corridors, reducing logistics costs, improving wagon turnaround time, and freeing up tracks for passenger train movement.

The new corridors consist of 434 smaller projects and will add 40,000 km of new tracks over a six-to-eight-year period post-completion.

The Cabinet recently approved six multi-tracking projects with a financial outlay of Rs 12,343 crore, likely to be completed by 2029-30, covering 18 districts in six states.

These initiatives aim to enhance transportation capacity for commodities such as food grains, fertilisers, coal, cement, iron, steel, and more, resulting in an additional freight traffic of 87 million tonnes per annum.