Dedicated Freight Corridor – Indian Railways

Dedicated Freight Corridor – Indian Railways

Dedicated Freight Corridor would mean that Goods train will get a free movement passage across the section. Goods train will have their dedicated corridors which would help de-congest Indian railways. Once thrown open, The 1,500-km western freight corridor runs from Dadri near Delhi to Jawahar Lal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai and the 1,800-km eastern corridor is from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal. Focus of the government is more on the Delhi- Mumbai Corridor because the quantum of goods and passenger trains is more on these routes.

The advantages of dedicated Freight Corridor are as below

• Speed of Goods train will increase from average of 25 kmph to 75 kmph which will help to increase the development speed of the country as raw materials will be reaching their destinations quickly.
• Due to dedicated freight corridors, Speed of Passenger trains will also increase.

Indian Railways has already acquired over 98% of the 11,000 hectares of land needed for the project and it will pay nearly Rs 15,000 crore as compensation for the land acquired. The construction of the western corridor is being fully funded by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, which has provided around Rs 33,000 crore as soft loan. The eastern corridor is being partially funded by the World Bank.

Once operational, the corridors will increase the national transporter’s freight carrying capacity to around 2,300 million tonnes, up from 1,200 million tonnes at present, and help reduce cost of freight transportation.