Faster, heavier, double-stacked: How two DFCs are transforming rail freight

The Eastern and Western DFCs now carry around 14 per cent of rail freight despite forming just 4 per cent of the network, cutting transit times and freeing capacity

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated the east and west Dedicated Freight Corridors to the nation earlier this month, he also finally brought the curtains down on a 21-year-long saga to build a trans-national railway network to faster transport goods and cargo across the length and breadth of the country.

 

An idea first mooted in the Union Budget of 2005, the Eastern and Western DFCs - originally envisaged to be 3,300-kilometres long, but later reduced to 2,843 km - are designed to connect ports and goods hubs. The Union Cabinet finally approved both corridors in 2008.

 

The Eastern corridor, from Ludhiana in Punjab to Sonnagar in Bihar - although it was originally planned till West Bengal - was completed in October 2023 at a cost of Rs 51,000 crore. However, the Rs 73,000 crore Western corridor that runs between Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA) in Maharashtra – was beset by a series of delays which led to the project overshooting its initial deadline of 2013 by 13 years.

 

In fact, multiple project delays and missed deadlines forced the government to serve a termination notice in November 2022 to the Tata Projects-led consortium responsible for the Vaitarna-JNPA stretch. However, it was revoked after the consortium assured the government that the work would pick up pace. The project was commissioned in June this year.

 

Both corridors also saw substantial cost increases, finally costing six times more than initial projections, thanks in no part to multiple revisions of plans along the way.

 

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated the western corridor to the nation on September 8, he said that the corridor would significantly bring down transit time between Delhi and Mumbai, the national and financial capitals of the country, respectively.

How it all started

The need for dedicated freight corridors and subsequent efforts to build one begins in India’s somewhat skewed supply chains.

 

Globally, coastal cities are hubs not just of trade, but also consumption, but this is not necessarily the case in India. While a number of cities along India’s 11,000-plus kilometre coastline have become manufacturing hubs in the decades following the 1991 economic reforms, consumption and parts of domestic manufacturing continue to be dominated by north and central India.

 

The corridors are meant to bridge this gap and make transport more efficient between these economic hotspots. The Eastern Corridor is a line that touches major thermal power plants and services their need for coal, which is Indian Railways’ largest ferried commodity and accounts for almost half of its freight basket. Additionally, the Eastern Corridor can also ferry other raw materials in bulk as well as finished goods. In 2024, Business Standard had reported how India had been able to avoid a 2022-like coal crisis thanks to the Eastern corridor, which was rapidly delivering coal stocks to power plants across north India.

 

The Western corridor, on the other hand, is a container freight mainstay, connecting ports like Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority, Pipavav, and Mundra Ports to hubs in central and north India via rail.

 

Meanwhile, 21 years after the first proposal, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in February announced a new freight corridor between Gujarat and West Bengal. However, sector experts say that the corridor, as well-intentioned as it may be, may unintentionally move coastal shipping cargo - which serves the same geographies - entirely to the railways once completed.

What sets the DFCs apart from the traditional freight network?

The DFC will exclusively ferry freight trains, with a 100 kilometre per hour (kmph) speed limit. For a number of sections, these trains do, in fact, run at these speeds. According to officials, Western DFC takes, on average, two-and-a-half hours to cover 100 km; in comparison, a freight train on a regular line takes nearly six hours.

 

“However, to the extent the freight traffic needs to use both DFC and traditional rail network, average speed may drop to 50 to 70 kms, but this would still be 2 to 3 the speed of normal freight trains in India,” said Kuljit Singh, partner at EY India.

 

According to officials of the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFCCIL) – the special purpose vehicle (SPV) for construction and operation of the DFCs – the average speed of 40-50 kmph on DFC is higher than the mixed-use Indian Railways network (15-23 kmph pre DFC, 32-34 kmph after DFC commissioning).

Saving time, saving money

Since the DFCs' commissioning, trains per day on the full Indian Railways network, including mixed-use lines, have increased by 25-30 per cent over the past three to four years when portions of the DFCs became operational. The faster operations also means a saving of 50-60 sets of operational crews daily across the network.

 

For the western corridor, the savings primarily lie in double-stacking containers onto a wagon, along with higher transit speeds. Railways charges the same freight rate for both mixed-use and dedicated tracks, so the turnaround time is the real benefit.

 

Manish Puri, president of the Association of Container Train Operators (Acto), notes that the optimum potential for cost-saving in container cargo is 25 per cent, but the current benefit accruing to container train operators is roughly 6-7 per cent.

 

Container train operations, or CTOs, are private entities licensed to run trains solely for container movement. Given that the western DFC has been operational since its commissioning in June, operators now have a clearer idea of how it has changed things.

 

“Double stacking from JNPA will provide additional capacity, and better turnaround has already started happening,” says Puri. The Western corridor had already been connected to Mundra (owned by Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone), state-owned Kandla, and Pipavav (owned by Danish giant APM Terminals, also India’s first private terminal) ports since 2024-25.

 

Puri also notes that not much will change with the extension of double-stacking till JNPA. “Mundra and Pipavav are still more than 300 km closer to North India, so as far as that cargo is concerned, it will continue to be serviced via those two ports,” he says.

 

However, he cautions that double-stacking also carries higher speed restrictions, which could slow down the whole network.

 

Experts add that JNPA will largely service central and South Central India, besides being a buffer in case congestion increases at Mundra. Containers currently account for 50 per cent of freight volumes on the western DFC, followed by miscellaneous cargo and crude oil.

 

Puri says that once double-stacking of containers began, JNPA started charging Rs 1,000 per container for loading and unloading. The association has asked the railways to rethink the weight-based regulations to run more efficiently and get more cost savings, which can be passed on to consumers.

 

Today, the DFCs take up only 4 per cent of the railway network but shoulder around 14 per cent of the total freight volume. According to official estimates, the two DFCs currently run about 435 trains a day, with capacity to increase that to 480 daily. According to the DFCCIL's annual report, the two corridors carried a total of 130,116 trains in 2024-25.

 

Indian Railways has also been able to venture into new commodity segments because of the corridors. In 2023, it signed an agreement with Amazon for transporting small cargo over DFC. This service currently runs between New Sanand and New Rewari stations, earning the Railways over Rs 30 crore. The Railways also transports milk trucks on trains under a special policy on these corridors.

 

However, the two DFCs may not suffice in the context of India’s larger ambitions. According to the latest available information, India wants to achieve 3,000 million tonnes of freight loading by 2031 – a target it has already pushed back by a year from the original 2030. This would mark a near-doubling of its current volume of 1,670 million tonnes. However, the last few years have been marked by sub-5 per cent growth in traffic; To achieve the new target, the Railways would have to deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 10 per cent.