VIZAG VISION:Waltair Division Excels all time record restoration work in Indian Railways,Vizag..
The challenge was to do it within a tight deadline of 60 days. In the end, Railways in fact did it in just 58 days, as the broken bridge in the mountains of Eastern Ghats stood restored before time on Friday. On October 6-7, a 700-ton boulder fell on the half-a-decade-old “bridge number 249” in the Araku Valley region of Andhra Pradesh; shattered its pier and rendered the country’s highest broad-gauge freight line useless.Within five days, work started to restore the bridge on war footing keeping a never-before 60-day deadline, putting to test Indian Railways’ engineering capability, and its ability to deliver on time. Incidentally, the bridge work coincided with time the Army was called in to build three foot overbridges in Mumbai’s suburban network in what was viewed by a section of railway bureaucracy as a snub to the national transporter’s engineering prowess.”The bridge was constructed with an expenditure of only Rs seven crore by using 400 laborers during the period of 58 days. This is the record of any bridge work done in so short a period,” East Coast Railway spokesperson JP Mishra told IANS.
He also said that the railways held the trial run with a tower wagon earlier in the day resulting commissioning of bridge work in record time.
“Formal traffic will be resumed from the midnight of December 11,” Mishra said.
Explaining the damage to the bridge due to land slide, the East Coash railway official said: “The impact on the pier was so huge that upper part of the pier from hit portion got sheared, separated and moved towards the valley by 1.6 metres.
“This had caused mis-alignment of track over the bridge as girders over the pier had also moved along with the pier,” he said.
He also said that for carrying on the construction work of the bridge, they have to stop the huge flow of the waterfall.
The 445-km Kothavalasa-Kirandul line, runs through the dense mountains of the Eastern Ghats and is one of the steepest broad-gauge freight line in the Indian Railways. It connects the NMDC’s iron ore mines in Chattisgarh with the steel plants and the port in Vishakhapatnam.
The route has over 58 tunnels and 84 major bridges and is the country’s highest broad-gauge freight line.
Following the damage to the bridge, the railways cancelled the journey of its glass-domed Vistadome coach attached to the Araku train.
The bridge of the rail line is adjacent to the scenic waterfall, which is about 90 km from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and 120 km from Koraput in Odisha.
