10 September,2020 07:04 AM IST | Mumbai | Rajendra B Aklekar
Illustration/Uday Mohite
From the present 11 hours to cover the 753km distance that it takes today for the fastest railway train to travel between Mumbai and Nagpur, the two important cities of Maharashtra, the bullet train promises to cut it down by half by travelling at a speed of 320kmper hour, covering the entire journey in six hours flat.
After the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train, the National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) on Tuesday begun work Mumbai-Nagpur bullet train with officials scrambling to gather documents and maps to prepare a detailed project report.
"Tenders were floated for the work of survey, identification of utilities and power sourcing options for substations along the proposed Mumbai-Nashik-Nagpur High Speed Rail corridor. This will help immensely in preparing the Detailed Project Report for the project and assess the area, the pathway and other technicalities," a top official said. The report will also include identification of locations for railway stations, land required for construction of railway lines and station premises.
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He said trains would be operated at a tentative speed of 320kmph along the stretch once it is up and running, with seamless connectivity between the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor too. However, the topography and other elements will be crucial elements in determining the final speed.
The existing fastest train between the two cities is the Mumbai-Nagpur Duronto Express that approximately takes 11 hours with an average overall speed of 65kmph and passes through the toughest mountains and Ghat sections near Igatpuri. Project reports are also being prepared for Delhi-Varanasi (865km), Delhi-Ahmedabad (886km), Chennai-Mysore (435km), Delhi-Amritsar (459 km), Mumbai-Hyderabad (711 km) and Varanasi-Howrah (760 km) high-speed railway corridors.
The railways have been looking at increasing sectional speed along the existing rail corridors too, but as High Speed Railway trains will exceed 300 kmph, it will be a separate corridor with standard gauge trains.
The Maharashtra Rail Infrastructure Development Company is also parallelly developing a parallel Pune-Nashik semi-high-speed corridor separately along with the existing railway corridor.
The Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor is likely to be delayed and miss the existing deadline of 2023 due to land acquisition issues and Covid-19 pandemic. The 508.17-km network has been planned to be passing through three districts in Maharashtra (Mumbai, Thane, and Palghar) and eight districts in Gujarat (Valsad, Navsari, Surat, Bharuch, Vadodara, Anand, Kheda, and Ahmedabad). Railway board chairman Vinod Yadav last week said so far 63 percent land had been acquired for the project, with 82 percent acquired in Gujarat and 23 per cent in Maharashtra. Sources added that the Maharashtra government's stand on the issue may also lead to issues. The present Maharashtra government has, said they will review the existing the entire project as a part of the wider audit of infrastructure projects.
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