# India building dedicated freight corridors



## jis (Aug 19, 2015)

In the US we look towards building passenger corridors. In India the situation is reversed. The current infrastructure is so glutted with passenger and freight trains, India is building new freight corridors that bypass the congestion for freight trains. This makes sense since the current routes pass through city centers with stations ideally located in the city centers. They just signed two contracts for the construction of major sections of the Western (Mumbai to Delhi) and Eastern (Kolkata to Jullundher via Delhi).

From the Railway Gazette:

The Western DFC Contract

The Eastern DFC Contract


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## cirdan (Aug 19, 2015)

jis said:


> In the US we look towards building passenger corridors. In India the situation is reversed. The current infrastructure is so glutted with passenger and freight trains, India is building new freight corridors that bypass the congestion for freight trains. This makes sense since the current routes pass through city centers with stations ideally located in the city centers. They just signed two contracts for the construction of major sections of the Western (Mumbai to Delhi) and Eastern (Kolkata to Jullundher via Delhi).
> 
> From the Railway Gazette:
> 
> ...


Are these all new track, or are they more akin to what the Dutch did for the Betuwelijn, combing sections of new build with sections of shared running on upgraded old lines whose capacity or signalling was enhanced.


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## jis (Aug 19, 2015)

All new track on new ROW with additional height clearance for future double stack operation. The electrification uses catenary at a higher height than on standard IR tracks.


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## Bob Dylan (Aug 19, 2015)

This is known as "Back to the Future" where India is investing in the Countries Future, while Uncle Sam and the Local Politicos are burying their head in the sand as to urgent needs!

Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles away and safety and efficient transportation is sacrificed on the altar of " Security" and funding Unwinnable Wars in the Middle East!


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## jis (Aug 19, 2015)

Interestingly both are funded fully by low interest long term loans, one from the Japan Development Bank, and the other from the World Bank. Naturally the JDB funded project has been contracted out to Mitsui and the World Bank funded one to a European consortium led by Alstom. Both contracts contains piles of "Build India" type of constraints. This has become pretty standard practice now for most non-military strategic infrastructure projects. Military strategic projects like the Kashmir Rail Link are apparently not contracted out to outsiders. Those go to IRCON or KRC and such.


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## cirdan (Aug 20, 2015)

What's the land ownership and NIMBY situation like in India. I always imagine the Indian countryside to be lots of smallhold farms, possibly lacking land registry documents making it difficult to determine who legally owns the land before you can even start discussing compensation. What are eminent domain powers like?


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## jis (Aug 20, 2015)

A lot of the construction is on land that is already owned by the railways. When the original lines were built during the days of the Raj, the railways were given very wide swaths of land. Currently the railways in many places lease out the land for farming, but the ownership still lies with the railways. In general for significant stretches along what used to be the EIR (East Indian Railway) ROW there is enough space to build not only a double track DFC, but eventually even to build a double track HSR should the need arise. Though I suspect an HSR would not follow the twisty turny classical ROW in many place but be built as a continuous high elevated structure across farmlands with relatively low environmental impact.

Where such is not the case it usually takes many years of eminent domain type litigation before the land can be acquired, often after political intervention, legislation and what not. Sometimes even that fails, like happened for the Kolkata to Dum Dum (Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International) Airport VIP (Kazi Nazrul Islam) road, which has left a big jog in the road and the elevated structure being built for the expressway above it. The East West Metro construction in Kolkata is held up at its western end due to the government's inability or lack of desire to evict squatters from land that is owned by the state government. Such odd things happen all the time.

However, in case of the DFCs they do not get into urban territory too much, and it is usually easier to negotiate rural land in exchange for promise of job in the railways or other infrastructure maintenance and operations and such. The Kolkata end of it for example ends in Dankuni way outside the urban area, in a huge multi-modal transfer facility. The Delhi end skirts the Delhi urban area to the east and north, to continue onto the north.


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## cirdan (Aug 21, 2015)

jis said:


> along what used to be the EIR (East *Indiana* Railway) ROW there is enough space to build not only a double track DFC, but eventually even to build a double track HSR should the need arise. T


Indiana? I'm assuming that's a typo.

So basically you're saying the new dedicated freight corridors will parallel existing railroads rather than being projected in a blank sheet manner?


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## jis (Aug 21, 2015)

cirdan said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> > along what used to be the EIR (East *Indiana* Railway) ROW there is enough space to build not only a double track DFC, but eventually even to build a double track HSR should the need arise. T
> ...


Yeah. typo, fixed in the original.

Wherever there is land available along existing ROW that is where they will go. Why go looking for trouble when you don;t need to. Of course in the urban and suburban areas they will deviate wildly from existing ROWs wince typically they will be avoiding getting into populated areas and tend to have intermodal terminals in areas that are utside of the highly populated areas as much as possible.

Just to give you an example of problems in populated areas, it has now taken something like 15 years to add one additional running track between Shantragacchi and Ramrajatola, two adjacent stations on the Sutheastern Railway, an absolutely critical addition because the SER maintenance facilities are at Shantragachhi, and all empty consists and locomotive have to be shuffled back and forth between there and Howrah Terminal. The reason for the delay - land acquisition problems on a segment less than a kilometer in length. It is only last year that they finally managed to put that short segment of single track into service. So yeah, things can get pretty hopelessly bad at times.


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