Railways identifies 6 high-speed corridors, 4 DFCs

The Railways has identified six new high-speed and semi-high speed rail corridors in the country and also four new Dedicated Freight Corridors, and the detailed project reports on these sections has been sought.

Railway Board Chairman V.K. Yadav said, "The Railways has identified six sections for high speed and semi-high speed rail corridors. And the detailed project report on all these sections will be completed within one to two years."

He said the railways has identified six new corridors for the high-speed or semi-high speed are -- 865 km Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi, 886 km Delhi-Jaipur-Udaipur-Ahmedabad, 753 km Mumbai-Nashik-Nagpur, 711 km Mumbai-Pune-Hyderabad, 435 km Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru and 459 km Delhi-Chandigarh-Ludhiana-Jalandhar-Amritsar corridors.

He said the internal study on the traffic potential and feasibility has been made for these corridors and on the funding aspect the railways is thinking of public private partnership or loan from the international agencies. Yadav further said that the work on the Dedicated Freight Corridor will be completed by December 2021.

He said, "Already we have started operations on over 500 km of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) and Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC)."

Giving the details, he said, on EDFC, operations have started on 194 km between Khurja-Badhan and on 306 km stretch between Madar-Rewari on WDFC.

The 3,373-km DFC, a flagship project of the Railways, aims to augment rail transport capacity to meet the growing requirement of movement of goods by segregating freight from passenger traffic.

The Western DFC runs from Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai to Tughlakabad and Dadri near Delhi, and aims to cater largely to the container transport requirements between the existing and emerging ports in Maharashtra and Gujarat and the northern hinterland.

The 1,839 km Eastern DFC runs from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni near Kolkata -- to be extended in future to serve the new deep-sea port proposed in the Kolkata area, and will largely handle coal and steel traffic. The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India plans to run freight trains at a maximum speed of 100 kmph as against the current 75 kmph.

It also plans to increase the average speed of freight trains from the existing 26 kmph to 70 kmph on the DFC. Yadav also said that the national transporter is looking for four new Dedicated Freight Corridors. He said, the railways has identified the new freight corridors -- 1,114 km East Coast Corridor from Kharagpur to Vijaywada, 1,645 km East West Sub Corridor between Bhusaval-Wardha-Nagpur-Rajkharswan-Kharagpur-Ulberia-Dankuni, 195 km East West Sub Corridor II, between Rajkharswan-Andal and 975 km North South sub Corridor from Vijaywada to Itarsi.

He said the Railways will now carry out the detailed project report of the 3,933 km four freight corridors and they will be completed in the next one or two years.IANS