Date Of Post: 29 Dec, 2017

New Delhi: The Railways plans to develop two speed raising projects of 3,000 km on Delhi-Mumbai & Delhi-Howrah routes at an estimated cost of Rs 18,000 crore. The proposed speed under these projects will be 200 kmph. “Two speed raising projects have been included in Pink Book 2017-18. The projects cover Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes,” Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain, in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, said.

Image Credit: Nikhilb239 – Wikimedia Commons

Delhi-Mumbai Route:

• The 1,483km long New Delhi-Mumbai (via Vadodara-Ahmedabad) route has an estimated cost of Rs 11,189 crore, he said.
• It passes through seven States-
  1. Maharashtra
  2. Gujarat
  3. Madhya Pradesh
  4. Rajasthan
  5. Haryana
  6. Uttar Pradesh
  7. Delhi

Delhi-Howrah Route:

• Gohain said, the 1,525 km New Delhi-Howrah route (including Kanpur-Lucknow), has an estimated cost of Rs 6,974 crore.
• It passes through five States-
  1. Delhi
  2. Uttar Pradesh
  3. Bihar
  4. Jharkhand
  5. West Bengal

Image Credit: Debashis.jena16 – Wikipedia

Golden Quadrilateral-

• The principal routes of the Railways on the Golden Quadrilateral along with diagonals (Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Howrah, Howrah-Chennai, Chennai-Mumbai, Delhi-Chennai & Howrah-Mumbai) carry around 58% of freight traffic & 52% of coaching traffic with a share of approx 15% of the network, which is about 9,100 km, the Minister said.
• The total average speed up to October 2017 of all goods trains is 23.1 kmph & passenger trains is 44.4 kmph in the country, Gohain said.

Image Credit: Debatramazumdar – Indian Railways Wiki