Cabinet nod to 9 rail projects worth Rs 21,000 crore

With an aim to de-congest the New Delhi-Chennai and Howrah-Mumbai rail sectors, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on Wednesday gave its nod to nine projects of double and triple lines of the ministry of railways worth about Rs 21,000 crore.

The projects will be completed in the next four years. Once completed, the projects will help the Railways to augment its capacity to carry 1.50 billion tonne of freight, besides faster movement of passenger trains.

The nine projects on completion will yield over 1937 km of additional track capacity, which will give a big boost to the currently saturated golden quadrangle corridors.

“The North-South and East-West corridors of the Railways are currently running at 120 per cent capacity. The current freight capacity of the railway network is 1,100 million tonne, which will reach 1,200 million tonne in 2016. Therefore, the CCEA approval to the nine projects for about 2,000 km of new tracks, which are mostly for doubling and tripling, will help the railways achieve the target to carry 1,500 million tonne of freight by 2020, besides improving the speed of passenger trains,” said A. K. Mital, chairman of railway board.

Mr Mital also said that the third lines to be built after the CCEA approval would have bi-directional signaling systems, which would allow running of trains on both sides unlike the first and second line.

He added that the Mumbai-Howrah and New Delhi-Chennai lines would get third lines, which would give a major boost to the capacity augmentation effort of the Railways.

The nine projects would cover 11 states, including Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Assam. There are seven third line projects, besides a fourth line and a doubling project.