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The construction of 12 out of the total 20 river bridges in Gujarat for the 508-km long Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train corridor has been completed.
The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) on Sunday (3 November) said that a 120-metre-long bridge over the Kharera river in Navsari district has become the twelfth bridge recently completed as part of the project in Gujarat.
Spanning 352 km in Gujarat and 156 km in Maharashtra, the bullet train project includes 12 stations planned at Mumbai, Thane, Virar, Boisar, Vapi, Bilimora, Surat, Bharuch, Vadodara, Anand/Nadiad, Ahmedabad, and Sabarmati.
Once operational, the bullet train is expected to cut down travel time between Ahmedabad and Mumbai to around 3 hours from the current 6 to 8 hours.
“All nine river bridges between Vapi and Surat Bullet Train Stations on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail Corridor are now complete. The recently completed Kharera River bridge in Navsari spans 120 meters, bringing the total to 12 completed river bridges out of 20 in Gujarat,” the NHSRCL said in a post on X.
The Kharera river is a tributary of the Ambika river, which originates from the hills in Vansda taluka, located near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border.
The river is located around 45 km from the Vapi bullet train station and 6 km from the Bilimora station.
Besides Kharera, bridges have also been constructed on the Par, Purna, Mindhola, Ambika, Auranga, Kolak, Kaveri and Venganiya rivers between Vapi and Surat.
In a statement, the NHSRCL also said that 16 km out of total 21 km of the tunnel is planned to be constructed using the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), and the remaining 5 km by the New Austrian Tunneling Method (NATM), news agency PTI reported.
The slurry type TBMs with cutter head diameter of 13.6 m are being procured keeping in mind the ground conditions and reliability.
“Works on three shafts for lowering and retrieval of TBMs are nearing completion. Further, the 394 m long Additional Driven Intermediate Tunnel (ADIT) is already completed and tunnel boring through NATM taken up at three faces simultaneously to pace up the work,” the statement said.
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