Kashmir Railway Project: Development of a Construction Project

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The railway project was officially termed as the Jammu Udhampur Srinagar Baramulla Railway Link. The line started at Jammu and, after completion, would cover 345 kilometers (214 miles) up to the city of Baramulla located on the northwestern edge of the Kashmir Valley. This was a highly challenging project for the Indian Railways as the region not only consisted of a few major earthquake zones but also experienced extremes in temperature and had an inhospitable terrain. Though the scheduled date of completion of the project was announced as August 15, 2007, a few unanticipated complications cropped up and the deadline for completion was rescheduled to 2017, at the earliest...

The designing of the Kashmir Railway was considered to be a prime railway engineering challenge, with competition coming only from the China Tibet railway track crossing permafrost at more than 5,000 m above sea level. Though the temperature of the area covered by the Kashmir Railway was not as extreme as that of China, winters here were very cold due to heavy snowfall. Also, the railway line had to pass through the Himalayan foothills, which were ever changing, geologically speaking. This added even more complexity to the designing of the route...

Building a railway system through mountainous terrain posed numerous challenges to the engineers, right from the conception stage. Maximum allowable speeds, high gradients, sharp curves, security and network to provide links proved to be additional constraints as compared to those usually faced in building a normal railway network. Projects in mountainous areas had to include deep cuttings, high embankments, long piers, and long-term bridges across deep gorges and fast flowing rivers with large stones and flash floods, unusually long tunnels, etc...

Much of the region which encompassed the Jammu-Udhampur-Katra-Qazigund-Baramulla rail link project consisted of highly undulating terrain, particularly the Katra-Qazigund section. Between Katra and Qazigund there was a strip of 70 km which consisted of dense forest with neither habitation nor a trekking path. Due to obvious difficulties, the initial alignments were done using satellite images and aerial photographs and these were projected on a topo sheet using a scale of 1:25000 and a 20 m contour interval...

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