Rail freight corridor sees global contest

A Rs 6,000-crore railway tender for the Khurja –Bhaupur section of 343 km on the eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) has had global construction companies vying to win it.

Sixteen entitites shortlisted in the pre-qualification stage include China Railway First Group, a part of state-owned China Railway Engineering Corporation, in consortium with Soma; Larsen & Toubro; Spanish companies Corsan and OHL, Turkey-based Alarko and Malaysia’s Leighton. They’ve all bid for the civil structure and track work contracts.

Consequent to this shortlisting, there will be a process of Request For Proposal (RFP) for the financial bidding. The final selection is expected by October-end. “The pre-qualification bid for the Rewari-Iqbalgarh section (625 km) in the western corridor has also been invited and we are expecting to finalise the results by February-end 2012,” said a DFC Corporation official. DFCC is the company set up, in 2006, under the ministry of railways to get the corridors through.

The Bhaupur–Khurja section is part of the Ludhiana-Mughalsarai stretch in the eastern corridor. The stretch has been divided into three sections. In this one of 343 km, around 234 km is parallel to the existing tracks and there is a detour of around 110 km.

There will be a phased commissioning of various sections, with 66 km of the 122-km Mughalsarai-Sonnagar section on the eastern corridor ready by December 2013.

DFCC has acquired around 52 per cent of the land. The total land required in the eastern and western corridors is around 10,000 hectares.

In the eastern corridor, the acquisition is around 2,000 ha; about 3,200 ha is needed in the western corridor. “Eighty per cent of the entire alignment of the eastern corridor is parallel to the existing railway track. However, the alignment takes a detour to skirt busy towns/cities and other inhabited areas, wildlife sanctuaries and forest areas,” said a railway official. The major detour alignment on the eastern corridor is at the Gurpa Gujandi Ghat Section, Gaya, Allahabad, Kanpur, Aligarh, Meerut and Tundla.

The 1,190 km Ludhiana-Mughalsarai stretch in the eastern corridor will be financed by the World Bank, in three phases — Khurja to Kanpur (343km), Kanpur to Mughalsarai (390 km) and Khurja to Ludhiana (397 km). Funding for each would be based on the work done in the previous stretch..

The Indian railways’ quadrilateral linking the four cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Howrah (Kolkata), and its two diagonals (Delhi-Chennai and Mumbai-Howrah), add to a route length of 10,122 km. This carries 55 per cent of revenue earning freight traffic. The existing trunk routes of Howrah-Delhi on the eastern corridor and Mumbai-Delhi on the western one are saturated, with line capacity utilisation between 115 to 150 per cent.

The upgraded design features of the DFC are meant to sustain 1.5 km of train length and a 100 kmph speed with a load of 15,000 tonnes. As against the norm of a 22.5-tonne axle load on the existing network, that on DFCC will be 32.5 or 25 tonnes, comparable to the standard in America, Russia and China.