India’s Bullet Train moves ahead!

Rajendra B. Aklekar
Sep 7, 2018 · 8 min read

A year on, ground report of India’s HSR

Rajendra B. Aklekar
One year after laying the foundation stone of India’s bullet train in September 2017, here’s a first look at what is happening on the ground — right from Ahmedabad to Mumbai.

India’s first bullet train, being built with the joint partnership of India and Japan by the National High-Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL), will traverse the 508-km long distance between Ahmedabad and Mumbai in 2 hours and 57 minutes covering 12 stations, including the originating and final station. However, stopping at just two stations, the faster bullet train will take 1 hour and 58 minutes with a 10-coach bullet train having a carrying capacity of 750 passengers. The frequency of train service at peak hours will be 20 minutes. While the bullet train will begin full operations in 2023, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set deadline of August 15, 2022 for flagging off the first bullet train.

Multi-Modal Sabarmati Hub near Ahmedabad

Located at 505.1 km from Mumbai, the Sabarmati Hub, the originating point of the High-Speed Rail (HSR), is coming up on a 13-acre land. 16 bidders have shown interest to build this hub, which will be a major interchange point for HSR, Indian Railways’ Sabarmati station, the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) of the city and the Ahmedabad Metro. The foundation stone lies in the middle of the plot facing the Metro Rail Line and the BRTS. The Sabarmati station is about 400 m from the site. On the ground, there is no activity as of now, but will soon stand a swank set of buildings.

The Sabarmati Hub, with roof-top solar panels, will have five buildings, (their aerial view will give an impression of a charkha), two of which will be developed extensively as multi-storey complexes. While one building will have nine floors above the ground level, the other will have seven floors above the ground. The nine-storey building will house offices as well as a hotel. The terminal building will have a concourse area on the third floor for facilitating passenger movement. This concourse will have waiting areas, retail and shopping hubs and restaurants and food courts.

The hub will be a themed on Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi Yatra of 1931 and will have connectors to the HSR platform. The hub will be developed as a commercial complex. This is the first stop.

To make way for the HSR rail tracks — 90 pc elevated and the rest underground and under sea — a number of utilities, workshops, structures and facilities in use are in the process of being relocated. The very first phase had been to identify them. Now that they have been identified, they will be relocated, but not before they are built up elsewhere at the cost of NHSRCL.

One of the first things that they are relocating is a container yard of Container Corporation of India. The land of the existing yard will be used up by NHSRCL, but an alternative yard of similar size with facilities is being built at Inland Container Depot (ICD) Khodiyar in the CONCOR complex itself at a cost of about Rs 50 crore. This will first be made functional and then the existing one demolished. Construction work has begun on the ground to build this alternative container yard and one could see rapid progress.

Vadodara High Speed Training Institute

The next in the line, but the first one to get going, has been the R600 crore Vadodara HSR training institute. This is expected to come up by 2020 (HSR trains intend to start partial operations by 2022, 15th August to be precise, to coincide with 75 years of India’s Independence from the British).

Construction has been on at quite a fast pace here, supervised jointly by Indian and Japanese teams. The institute will train HSR train pilots and operations teams. The institute will provide state-of-the-art training modules on cutting edge technologies relating to HSR, says Dhananjay Kumar NHSRCL spokesperson. Located next to the alma mater for the Officers of the Indian Railways, National Academy of Indian Railways (NAIR), the HSR training institute is coming up in two parts. First is the training academy and secondly the lodging units. Both will be connected with a pathway. While the lodging units are coming up on an open space next to NAIR, the main institute will be almost inside the NAIR premise.

At present, the lodging unit is at an advanced stage of construction and the plot required for the actual training inside the academy is being cleared. The plot today has a few quarters and buildings, which are being demolished and would be again rebuilt at the cost of NHSRCL. Quite a few trees inside the NAIR premise will either be transplanted or saved. A huge banyan tree, for example, near the lodging units has been incorporated into the building design and will remain standing there as the canteen units come up around it, a concept of a green building design, said NHSRCL Vadodara Chief Project Manager Pradeep Ahirkar.

The HSR training centre will have a 50-metre sample track slab of the bullet train fitted with the overhead electrical systems to enable testing. It will have a concrete track bed with 60kg rails. The assembled test track slabs are ready and now in the process of being shipped to India. They shall arrive by December 2018 itself.

Tree transplant trucks along the corridor

The National High Speed Rail Corporation has brought in ‘Big John’ automatic tree transplanter trucks that lift a living tree with its roots and replant it at another place within a period of 30 minutes.

This is being done in India for the first time at this scale in India. “The basic need to get these machines is to save the environment and transplant as many trees along the routes as possible,” Dhananjay Kumar, spokesperson of the National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) said.

Explaining the methodology, he said, “Popularly known as the ‘Tree Spade’ this, all hydraulic, tree transplanting machine, mechanizes transplanting or relocating of large bushes and small and medium sized plants and trees, where manual transplanting using traditional methods with spades, wagons, and other equipment would be expensive, laborious and time consuming.”

“What this all hydraulic tree spade does for tree transplanting, can be compared to what the tractor and combine harvesters do for agriculture, and what the excavators and other heavy equipment do for the construction industry,” he added.

The Tree Spade consists of a number of hydraulically operated blades that that are capable of being opened up to encircle the tree that is required to be relocated. The entire tree with the root ball (including its roots and soil), is pulled out of the soil, carried and transported on the equipment vehicle itself, and driven to a different location where the whole tree with its roots and soil is replanted into an already prepared pit.

Chhayapuri Halt Station making way for HSR at Vadodara

A small rail level halt station on the Godhra line of Indian Railways is being developed as a satellite station to make way for work on the HSR line. Platform seven at Vadodara station in Mumbai direction of Chhayapuri station is presently used as a reversal point for trains coming from Ahmedabad and on its way to Godhra with the help of a chord line. Since platform seven, along with a few other utilities, at Vadodara station will be done away with temporarily for the work of High Speed Rail, it has been decided to develop Chhayapuri as a satellite station. It has double benefit in the sense that the local area has grown so much that it indeed required a satellite station and secondly, its development will reduce congestion at Vadodara station. “This will take off load from Vadodara just like Delhi’s Nizamuddin station has done,” Ahirkar added.

It is two-line section and Chhayapuri just has a small booking hut with no platforms, but just a few seats. A number of local trains halt here catering to the local travel.

To be built at a cost of R40 crore, which has been handed over to Western Railway by NHSRCL, the station will consist of three floors and modern facilities. The new building will have two platforms for the four lines. The building, the construction of which has already begun, is expected to be ready by March 2019 following which operations will begin. At present, the new platforms are being aligned and under process of completion.

Bridge larger than one in Japan at Vadodara

The existing Vadodara station, that handles about 200 trains daily, is set for a major makeover. The HSR alignment passes over the station with a 220-metre long bridge span that will cross over this Indian Railways’ major station without majorly disturbing its traffic. This will be the longest such girder bridge, longer than any of the ones on the Japanese Shinkansen networks. It is an interesting method in which they are doing this.

The HSR track, about 15 metres high up. The HSR line that crosses from one side of the railway line to another will lead to demolition of existing station building facade, booking offices and a few other utilities on one side and platform seven on the other side for the HSR pillars. The station façade and the platform will be rebuilt again once the work is over in about four years’ time. Platform seven today caters to seven pairs of trains, which will then by handled by the new Chhayapuri satellite station that is being developed.

“Since Vadodara is famous for Vad (banyan) trees, the station façade is being themed on the banyan tree design, going by the local flavour,” Ahirkar said. The new upgraded building of Vadodara station will have three levels; ground for Indian Railways’ trains, bullet train HSR concourse at a level above that and finally the third for the bullet train tracks and station itself.

“Launching the longest girder will be a very complicated and challenging process for which initially a 100-metre temporary girder across Vadodara station would be built. It also involving placing a huge pillar pin and rotating the assembled girders. All this will be done without majorly stopping the Indian Railways’ traffic below,” Ahirkar added.

Land acquisition by December 2018

In Maharashtra, land is being acquired in village pockets and towns where the HSR alignment passes through. Primarily, the HSR requires only 17.5 metres or 60 feet of land along the stretch for the pillars to stand. Below the HSR alignment, there will be a service road along the entire stretch to be used for maintenance of the HSR network or for any possible emergencies. The NHSRCL is paying five times the land value whose land is being taken and 25 times of the value to all those who are willingly consented to give up land. Besides this, the NHSRCL has taken up a host of social development measures to improve the living in villages. The land acquisition is being done in Maharashtra Dadra-Nagar Haveli and Maharashtra which is expected to be majorly complete by December 2018.

The NHSRCL expects to complete all the preparatory works and clear the pathway along the alignment before the main contractors arrive to begin the actual construction of the line.

Rajendra B. Aklekar

Written by

Journalist Mid-Day. Author of numerous books on India's trains & railways, including one shortlisted at Bangalore Literary Fest. Biographer Dr E Sreedharan