The work for the most hard 111 km lengthy section of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail hyperlink project will be completed by December 2022.
Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail hyperlink: In two years, Kashmir would be connected to the rest of India by way of the Indian Railways network. The work for the most hard 111 km lengthy section of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail hyperlink project will be completed by December 2022 that would provide railway connectivity to Kashmir. Northern Railway GM Ashutosh Gangal, was quoted in a PTI report saying that the work on this project is going on in complete swing and it will be completed by 2022-finish. The 272 km lengthy line is getting undertaken by Northern Railways at an estimated price of Rs 28,000 crore. The initial section linking Udhampur to Katra and the third section of the railway line involving Banihal and Baramulla have been completed and each these sections are operational. To full the most hard section of Katra-Banihal, the work is going as per schedule.
According to Gangal, the national transporter was working to assure that the railway project gets completed as per the scheduled time. The COVID-19 pandemic predicament has impacted the project’s work, he admits. The 25 km lengthy Udhampur-Katra section, 18 km lengthy Banihal-Qazigund section and 118 km lengthy Qazigund-Baramulla section have been commissioned currently. The 111 km lengthy Katra-Banihal section, which is the final remaining section, is at present beneath execution. The GM additional mentioned that out of 174 km of tunnels on this section, 126 km has currently been completed.
According to the officials of Northern Railways, probably, the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail hyperlink project is the most hard new rail line project undertaken by the national transporter. The project has been divided into 3 sub-sections for execution purposes. The most hard stretch of this rail line project, Katra-Qazigund leg, and its alignment which is 129 km lengthy, passes by way of the ranges of Patni and Pir Panjal.
This alignment demands building of as several as 62 important and key bridges and minor bridges, apart from the improvement of 35 tunnels, totalling 103 kms length bringing the percentage of the total length of the tunnels’ alignment to about 80%. According to the officials, this project is very vital to provide a trustworthy and option transportation method to J&K to join Kashmir Valley to the country’s rail network. In the year 2002, thinking of the significance of this project, it was declared as a national project.
Last year in the month of November, PM Modi took stock of the progress of this rail hyperlink project and gave explicit guidelines to authorities to expedite the project work and full it by subsequent year. The deadline of 2020 was fixed by the Prime Minister for the ambitious project linking Srinagar to the Indian Railways network.