Rain-ravaged Pune-Mumbai line may reopen in January

PUNE: The rain-rocked Up line - the third track in the Bhor Ghat section of the Central Railway - is marked 117km on the official railway infrastructure map. It can be accessed only by rail, which stops at the approaching tunnel. And it is quite a sight.

Giant machines are at work. Be it drills, excavators, piling machines, reinforced cement concrete mixers or pipes of various dimensions, all of them have been taken there using supply trains, on giant flatcars.

At any given point in time, 40 workers are on the site, complimented by the Central Railway's "hillside" team - a group of locals having intimate knowledge of the topography. Its job is to identify loose rocks on the 60-metre-tall rock face next to the track. During railway traffic blocks or pre-determined times, those rocks are hurtled down and out of harm's way.

The track was damaged on the night of October 2. At the site, a few kilometres north-west of Khandala railway station , workers and engineers have had around two weeks of uninterrupted time to work on the site, through three shifts, day and night, as rain subsided since November 5. A steel bridge, which partly links the two tunnels, is now being extended by nearly 130 metres to completely link the two tunnels, almost.

"We had two options. First, to fill up the embankment again with boulders and soil, but that would carry the risk of the subsidence happening again next monsoon . The second option was to extend the bridge. We chose the second. This has also come with the additional work of micro-piling on site to strengthen it for the construction of the piers," said Shivaji Sutar, the chief public relations officer of the Central Railway.

As its next challenge, the Central Railway team is planning the ways to bring in and safely launch the girders of the bridge. "Now, the girders have to be brought in by rail. Each of them is more than 24 metres in length. We can't bring in whole girders, but we shall have to bring them in piece by piece, and weld and assemble them on the site. If all goes well, this track may be opened by January 15 next year," said Ashutosh Gupta, the additional divisional railway manager, Mumbai.

On a tour arranged by the Central Railway to showcase its ongoing Rs10-crore project to refurbish the Pune-Mumbai Up line, the officials stressed on the challenges they faced ever since the track subsided by four metres after torrential rain on the night of October 2.

"Since that day, we started the work. The first boulders came in on October 3 to strengthen the base. Our workers have been here almost permanently since then. So are some of our engineers and supervisors," said Gupta, in charge of infrastructure for much of the network.