Express News Service
NEW DELHI: If all goes well, the world’s highest rail bridge, which is being built across Chenab River in J&K, may be ready for commissioning to the rail traffic, most probably by December 2022.
The bridge has been designed to be built 1315 meter in length on the Katra-Banihal rail section in Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir with a 359-meter high main arch span from the Chenab river bed level, at the cost of Rs 27949 crore.
Although the railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw did not give any exact date for the commissioning of this bridge in reply to a question in the Lok Sabha recently, if sources related to this project are to be believed, this bridge is likely to be ready by December 2022. This bridge is world’s highest railway bridge as a part of the ambitious Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail link (USBRL) project will be an engineering marvel of Indian Railways. Its last arch closure was completed on the bridge in April this year by the railway has been taken up as a challenge by the Indian Railways because of its location being in very tough hilly terrain.
As union minister of state for railways Darshan Jardosh recently tweeted: “Once fully completed, the bridge will stand at 359 meters above the river bed level making it the highest railway bridge in the world. It would be another engineering marvel from Indian Railways”.
“This bridge will be iconic and attract tourists from across the globe also to see and cross over the river Chenab through this bridge by a train”, a senior railway official said, adding that the bridge arch upon being fully constructed would be around 35 meters higher than the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris.
It will be built with a massive fabrication of more than 28,660 MT steel with 26 km motorable roads. The bridge arch’s overall weight is said to be around 10,619 MT and its design has been developed with the help of software called ‘tekla’ that helped the engineers in structural detailing. The tekla software is used basically in the construction of industry for steel in concrete detailing, pre-cast, and cast-in-situ as it enables the users to create 3D structural models in steel to facilitate the actual construction. Another most striking salient technical feature of this bridge is that the structural steel with which the bridge is built has a capacity to stand with -10°C to 40°C of temperature.
