Dedicated freight corridors in India

The Dedicated freight corridors in India are a network of broad gauge freight railway lines that solely serve freight trains, thus making the freight service in India faster and efficient. The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India is responsible for undertaking planning, development, and mobilisation of financial resources and construction, maintenance and operation of these corridors.

WAG-12B locomotive with a power output of 12,000 HP which is among the most powerful locomotive in the world, is being deployed on dedicated freight corridors.
Under construction picture of Eastern dedicated freight corridor. The tracks of dedicated freight corridors in India are broad gauge.

History

Origins of freight transport in India

After establishing the British Rule in India, the Britishers introduced trains to facilitate cargo transport from the heartlands of India to the trading centres that they had set up. The first proposals for freight railways in India were made in Madras (now Chennai) back in 1832.[1] The first train in India ran from Red Hills to Chintadripet bridge in 1837.[1] It was named the Red Hill Railway and it used a rotary steam locomotive manufactured by William Avery. The railway was built by Sir Arthur Cotton and was mainly used for transporting granite stones for road-building work in Madras.[1] Later in 1845, Cotton built the Godavari Dam Construction Railway at Dowleswaram in Rajahmundry, to supply stone for construction of a dam on the Godavari River.[1]

An early steam powered freight train in India.
First train of East India railway.

In 1851, the Solani Aqueduct Railway was built in Roorkee. The freight was hauled by a steam locomotive called Thomason, named after a British officer. It was used for transporting construction materials for an aqueduct over the Solani river.[1]

On 8 May 1845, the Madras Railway was incorporated, and the East Indian Railway Company (EIR) was incorporated the same year. On 1 August 1849, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) was incorporated by an Act of Parliament. The Great Indian Peninsula Railway introduced a broad gauge of 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) for the first passenger railway line in India, between Bori Bunder and Thane. This was later adopted as the standard throughout the country, as it was thought to be safer in areas prone to cyclones and flooding.[2][3] The 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) gauge is now commonly referred to as Indian gauge. While some initial freight railway lines in India were built using standard gauge, most of the standard and narrow gauge railways have since been dismantled and relaid in broad gauge under the Project Unigauge initiated in 1990.[4]

Problems India faced in freight rail transportation
A freight train halted at Dhenkanal railway station.

The demand for passenger rail grew as the time went by. At the end of the 20th century, India had built one of the largest networks of railways, but the timely freight transport services were not provided with the priority and freight trains were often halted abruptly to pave the way for passenger trains. The Indian logistics cost was also sky high, taking up 13-15% share of India's GDP.[5] Hence, there was need of a solution which would ease the burden on modern railway network and boost India's industrial growth.

Implementation of Dedicated Freight Corridors
The Joint Secretary, Ministry of Finance, Shri Kumar Sanjay Krishna and Ambassador of Japan to India, Mr. Hideaki Domichi signing Exchange of Notes for Dedicated Freight Corridor Project (Phase-1) with Government of Japan, in New Delhi on October 27, 2009.

As the need for a dedicated freight corridor arose, in December 2006, an agreement was signed between India and Japan for the Development of two exclusive rail freight corridors, also known as Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC) as a part of economic co-operation for industry and trade. One between Delhi and Mumbai, termed as Western Corridor and other between Delhi and Kolkata termed as Eastern Corridor. A band of 150 km each on either side of this corridor was planned to be developed exclusively for industrial development.

List of corridors

Summary

Green background for the systems that are under construction. Blue background for the systems that are currently in planning.

Dedicated Freight Corridor Length (km) Status
Start Point Termination Point
Western Dedicated Freight Corridor 1504 Partly Operational Dadri JNPT, Nava Sheva
Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor 1873 Partly operational Ludhiana Dankuni
East-West Dedicated Freight Corridor 2000 Announced in Budget 2021–22[6] Dankuni Bhusawal
North-South Dedicated Freight Corridor 975 Announced in Budget 2021–22[7] Vijayawada Itarsi
East Coast Dedicated Freight Corridor 1115 Announced in Budget 2021–22 Kharagpur Vijayawada
Southern Dedicated Freight Corridor 892 Proposed Madgaon Chennai
Total 8359

Impact on the Indian economy

The dedicated freight corridors aim to bring down the cost of freight transport, by using electrical fuel, bigger and larger trains, thus helping Indian industries to become competitive in the world export market.[8] These corridors will also help India achieve the targets it has committed to in the paris climate accord, by switching from diesel propelled freight trains and fossil fuel-based road traffic to the electricity based railway locomotives. India is growing in renewable energy production, with most of the country's new electricity generation capacity being added through solar, wind and nuclear sources.[9]

The new generation pantograph allows an increase in the height of the overhead wires (catenary height) from the standard 6 meters (19 ft 8+1⁄4 in) to 7.45 meters (24 ft 5+1⁄4 in)[10] -setting the world record for the high reach pantograph for highest catenary for electric locomotives, this will also enable Indian railways to introduce double-decker passenger trains in high-density suburban passenger route and roro cargo service across the Indian railways network. The Indian passenger railway network will be able to run semi-high speed and high-speed trains in the existing network, as 70% of cargo traffic will migrate to the dedicated freight corridors.

The Eastern DFC may not be able to support roro as it has height of 5.1 meters (16 ft 8+3⁄4 in) compared to 7.1 meters (23 ft 3+1⁄2 in) of the Western DFC. While the Konkan railway is the only railway zone in India, which has streamlined the roro service and is able to save 75 million litre diesel fuel and related foreign exchange for the country.[11] roro services are deployed in East central railway, Northeast Frontier railway zones along with Konkan railway, but, roro has failed to be successful in existing electrical railway infrastructure because of the height of the overhead electrical wires.[12][13]

See also

References
  1. "[IRFCA] India's First Railways". www.irfca.org. Archived from the original on 21 February 2018. Retrieved 24 July 2017.
  2. "Railroads Asia – Up And Down India".
  3. Indian Railways: Some Fascinating Facts, "Train Atlas", Train Atlas, Indian Railways, 2003
  4. "Indian Railways: Glorious History". Press Information Bureau, Government of India. New Delhi: Ministry of Railways. 21 February 2007. Retrieved 1 February 2020. The Project Unigauge was launched on April 1, 1992 to develop the backward regions and to connect important places with broad gauge network.
  5. "India Takes a Quantum Leap in Building New Freight Corridors". Worldbank. 21 January 2021.
  6. Agarwal, Anshu. "DFCs to raise rail share in freight traffic to 45%".
  7. Agarwal, Anshu. "Vij to get dedicated freight corridors". The Times of India.
  8. "in freight, rail can outpace road via corridors | forbes india blog". forbes india. Retrieved 2017-06-27.
  9. johnnys desk (2017-04-09), india's mega dfc project will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, retrieved 2017-08-01
  10. "reaching up". railway gazette international. August 2009. p. 17.
  11. "konkan railway's roro saves 750 lakh litre diesel". the hindu. Retrieved 2017-08-16.
  12. "indian railways roro service hits infrastructure hurdle, needs structural change to work effectively". the financial express. 2017-04-04. Retrieved 2017-08-16.
  13. "railways roll-on-roll-off service goes off track due to technical hurdles". Retrieved 2017-08-16.
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