Work in progress! Piyush Goyal reviews various sections of Indian Railways’ Dedicated Freight Corridor project

On DFCs, freight trains will run at the maximum speed of 100 km per hour as against the current maximum speed of 75 km per hour.

Dedicated Freight Corridor Project: Recently, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal reviewed the progress of various Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) sections of Indian Railways. According to the Railway Minister, the DFCs will play an important role in realizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat by providing enhanced connectivity, reduced logistics cost as well as increased freight speed. The DFC project, comprising of two corridors- Eastern DFC and Western DFC, is being implemented by the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFCCIL). On DFCs, freight trains will run at the maximum speed of 100 km per hour as against the current maximum speed of 75 km per hour. Besides, the average speed of freight trains will also be increased to 70 km per hour from the existing speed of 26 km per hour.

The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor will start from Sahnewal near Ludhiana and will terminate at Dankuni in the state of West Bengal. The 1875 route km long EDFC will pass through the states of Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, UP and Jharkhand. The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor will link Dadri in the state of Uttar Pradesh to Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNPT) in the city of Mumbai. The 1506 Route km long WDC will traverse through the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

Recently, the DFCCIL announced that in a first, a Double Stack Container train trial run was done on DFC from Mundra port in the state of Gujarat to CONCOR Kathuwas MMLP National Capital Region (NCR) after completion of track linking between New Palanpur and New Kishanganj. According to DFCCIL, the rake contained 178 containers in total with five of the containers destined for New Kathuwas in Rajasthan (NCR); 78 containers for Dhandari Kalan railway station in Ludhiana, Punjab; 90 containers for Dadri (NCR) in the state of Uttar Pradesh and five containers for Panitola railway station in the state of Assam.