After a 41-year wait, Kashmir to get pinned on Indian Railways map in 2024

The Northern Railways is set to complete construction of the 111-km Katra-Banihal line connecting Srinagar and Jammu under the USBRL project in December or early next year. Once completed, it will link Udhampur, Baramulla and Srinagar, writes ETV Bharat's Muhammad Zulqarnain Zulfi.

Srinagar :After missing several deadlines, the people of Jammu and Kashmir will finally have an all-weather train connectivity with the rest of the country in the first quarter of 2024. Currently, the Northern Railway is working on the most challenging 111-kilometre stretch of the train link between Udhampur, Srinagar, and Baramulla.

The project known as the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Railway Line (USBRL) is almost complete with only a small portion left to be completed on the 111-kilometre Katra-Banihal train line, Chief Public Relations Officer (CPRO) of Northern Railway Deepak Kumar told ETV Bharat over phone. He said that the Udhampur-Banihal route, which connects Jammu and Srinagar, will be completed by December of this year or early next year, as announced by Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

"Very soon, Vande Bharat will also be operated on the newly constructed railway line from Jammu to Srinagar. By the end of this fiscal year (March 2024), the Jammu-Srinagar railway line is expected to start operation. This train has been engineered in a distinctive manner to ensure seamless operation in those temperatures and altitudes," Vaishnaw claimed on October 19 of this year.

Notably on November 6, 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set 2020 as the completion date for the 272-km Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Railway Line, which is being constructed at a cost of Rs 27,949 crores. Then, on August 23, 2020, the Northern Railways notified Jammu and Kashmir's Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha that they had been instructed to finish building a 148-kilometre line from Katra to Banihal by August 15, 2022, which was a year later than the scheduled deadline.

With 38 tunnels totaling 119 km as part of the USBRL project, T-49 is the longest transit tunnel in the country at 12.75 km. The Anji Khad River's steep slope was also crossed by 927 bridges, including the nation's only cable-stayed rail bridge and the famous Chenab Bridge, which stands at 359 metres high. At a height of 359 metres (1,178 feet) above the riverbed, the tallest railway bridge across the Chenab, built at a cost of Rs 1,400 crore, is 35 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

A key feature of the Rs 35,000 crore USBRL Project is the bridge connecting the Katra and Banihal railway lines. The project, which was designated as a national project in 2003, intends to connect Kashmir Valley to the Indian Railways network by offering Jammu and Kashmir an alternate and dependable transit option.

On October 28, 2009, the 18-kilometre section of the Kashmir Valley between Qazigund and Anantnag was officially flagged off by then-prime minister Manmohan Singh. After Indira Gandhi, her son Rajiv Gandhi, Inder Kumar Gujral, Deve Gowda, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh was the sixth Indian prime minister to inaugurate railway projects and trains in Jammu and Kashmir. PM Modi also joined the league, as seventh prime minister of India, in 2014.

Jammu and Kashmir was cut off from the Indian railway network in 1947 due to partition of India and Pakistan, necessitating the construction of a new line from Pathankot to Jammu. The only railway connection to the state was the Sialkot to Jammu service, which was started in 1897.

Although the Jammu-Pathankot railway line's foundation stone was laid in 1971, it took a further four years for this strategically important connection to be put into service. The 54-kilometer Jammu-Udhampur segment began in 1983 with the foundation laid by then-prime minister Indira Gandhi. Subsequently, the railways pledged to develop a train link of 290 kilometres to Baramulla in the Valley.

However, nothing was done until 1996, when the then prime minister, P V Narasimha Rao, approved Rs 2,600 crore for the construction of a rail link between Udhampur and Baramulla. For several years afterward, the project made no progress at all. Nevertheless, in 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced it as a national project.