Vibs
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The Konkan Railway is a railway line which runs along the Konkan Coast of India. It was constructed and is operated by the Konkan Railway Corporation. It runs from Manglore in Karnataka to Mumbai in Maharashtra through Goa, along the west coast of India and Western Ghats.
With a total number of over 2,000 bridges and 91 tunnels to be built through this mountainous terrain containing many rivers, the project was the biggest and perhaps most difficult railway undertaking during this century, at least in this part of the world. There were challenges posed by the terrain and the elements. Flash floods, landslides and tunnel collapses affected work at many places on the project. The region was also thickly forested, and construction sites were often plagued by wild animals.
Contracts for the project were awarded to some of the biggest and most reputed construction firms in India, including Larsen and Toubro, Gammon India and AFCONS. To enable quicker construction, several innovative practices were adopted. Piers for major bridges were cast on the riverbanks itself and launched using cranes mounted on pontoons. The technique of incremental launching of bridge spans was used for the first time in India. Since it would take too long to complete the project using locally available tunnelling technology, nine hydraulic tunnelling machines were imported from Sweden in order to bore through the hard rock of the Sahyadris. The biggest challenge, however, came from the nine tunnels that had to be bored through soft soil. No technology existed anywhere in the world for this purpose and the work had to be carried out through a painstakingly slow manual process. Excavation was almost impossible due to the clayey soil that was saturated with water owing to a high water table in the region. Several times tunnels collapsed immediately after they had been dug, necessitating work to be redone. Nineteen lives and four years were lost while constructing the soft soil tunnels alone. In all, seventy-four people perished during the construction of the line.
The route is a single-line track, and is not electrified. The total length of the line is about 738 kilometres (459 mi). Although it has been designed for high-speed traffic of 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph), the fastest train on the route, the Rajadhani Express, at present runs at a maximum speed of 130 kilometres per hour (81 mph).
