Chenab Bridge may be ready this month; minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to visit spot this weekend

The Chenab Bridge, hanging with its steel and concrete structure — the showpiece, half-a-kilometre-long steel arch that defines it– between Bakkal and Kauri, is 1,178 feet above the riverbed underneath, making it the world’s highest railway bridge.

The bridge will be a major milestone in completing the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL), also known as the Kashmir link. “The Railway Board has been informed about the completion of the bridge. It is a major milestone in the Kashmir link project,” said a senior official.

The bridge, being built at around Rs 14,00 crore, is the biggest civil-engineering challenge faced by any railway project in India in recent history.

Over the last three years, engineers have been building the arch with the help of two mammoth cable cranes installed on both banks of the Chenab — the Kauri end and the Bakkal end.

The biggest challenge was that the 550-metre arch, weighing 10,000 metric tonnes, had to stand only with the support from the two embankments and without any intermediate pier since the river is 359 metres below and no pier could possibly come at a height like that. From “support to support”, the distance is 467 metres. The whole bridge is going to weigh around 29,000 metric tonnes. Engineers started the work from both embankments simultaneously, starting with installing the cranes that would launch the arch.

Each specially-designed cable crane is around one kilometre long. The two cranes have been working independently and also in synchrony, from each bank and joining pieces of the arch bit by bit.

For welding the steel pieces, a national-accredited welding lab-cum -workshop was erected on the construction site to speed up work — a first for a project in India. Steel pieces are cut with computerised machines, then they are tested as per the standard before being okayed for deployment. The total length of all the welding done for the arch, if added together, is around 550 km— “almost the distance between Delhi and Jammu,” an official said.

Currently, the railway link to Kashmir is basically a 25-km stretch of Udhampur to Katra, and 18 km of line from Banihal to Qazigund in the valley and after that a 118 Qazigund-Baramulla stretch. These have been running for years.

The only missing link is the 111-km geologically treacherous stretch between Katra and Banihal. There is also a smaller bridge over river Anji before the Chenab. But as far as engineering challenge is concerned, it is no match for the Chenab bridge, engineers say.

When the 111-km stretch is done, a train to Srinagar can reach all the way to Kanyakumari uninterrupted.