The Indian Railways is all set to lay 7 km of track a day to deal with the problem of traffic congestion. Also, it aims at starting work on three new freight corridors including East Coast corridor East West corridor and North South corridor that’ll eventually help in increasing the average speed of passenger trains.
The railway track doubling and trebling is being managed in saturated corridors including the following routes:
| Route 1 | Delhi-Mumbai |
| Route 2 | Delhi- Howrah |
| Route 3 | Delhi-Chennai |
| Route 4 | Howrah-Chennai |
| Route 5 | Ahmedabad-Rajkot |
As per the railway officials, the priority is to deal with congestion on choked corridors to be able to facilitate faster movement of passenger trains and thus speed up the process. Besides taking the load off existing rail network, the facilitation would accelerate faster movement of goods.
During the previous UPA regime, a 4.3 km track was laid per day. The plan now is to lay 7 km of track a day between 2016-17. It is learnt that the railways commissioned nearly 2500 km of new track in 2015-16, about 40% more than the achievement in the year 2014-15. The aim to reach an average of 13 km of rails laid every day in 2017-18. The bar will further be raised to 19 km per day in 2018-19 as told by the Railway Ministry officials. And as per Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, the average speed of super-fast trains would be increased by up to 25 km/hr in the next three years.
While East Coast DFC will link Kharagpur with Vijayawada, North-South DFC will connect Delhi to Chennai and East-West DFC will connect Kharagpur to Mumbai. The three additional Dedicated Freight Corridor will be funded through innovative financing mechanism including PPP. And at present, the work is in progress on both Eastern and Western DFC. While the Eastern corridor is funded by World Bank, funding of Western corridor is being backed by Japan. It’s interesting to know that both corridors will be electrified routes.
