India is going to witness a historic moment of metro running underwater for, the first time in Kolkata, as published by the Hindustan Times. Kolkata Metro has launched on Wednesday 12th April, a metro corridor running water Hooghly River; a milestone that couldn’t be achieved by anyone in this country so far. The first maiden journey of the metro was made by only officials and engineers on board from Howrah Maidan to Esplanade, as a test drive.
It is thus indeed a victorious historic moment for all Indians to witness such creative engineering and outstanding work that is now going to solve the distance issue of such a long journey track in no time. The railway manager of our Metro Railway, P Uday Kumar Reddy has said that the trail runs between Howrah and Esplanade will be conducted for the next five to seven months continuously for making any other necessary changes in the engineering works and to strictly keep an eye on the detailed constructions, to avoid any negligence or future accidents. After this event, regular services of this metro will be available for common people. Kolkata people are highly anticipating this regular service on this stretch with excitement.
A list of detailed information about India’s first underwater train is here as follows:
The tunnel is a copy of Eurostar’s London-Paris corridor. It is 13 metres tunnel made below the river bed and is 33 metres below the ground level.
The stretch of this metro reportedly has 4 stations namely Esplanade, Mahakaran, Howrah and Howrah Maidan. It is going to take around 45 seconds to cross this huge tunnel.
The tunnel is a distance of 520m. The stretch will cover the length from the IT hub of Salt Lake Sector V (east) to Howrah Maidan (west) across the river.
By road, the distance between Howrah to Sealdah is a long stretch of around 1.5 hours. The metro is believed to cut down that distance just by the travel time of 40 minutes to everyone’s surprise. People can now reach their destinations much faster than expected. It will reduce the crowd at both ends.
With this metro construction, the underground water seepage that caused cracks in 12 buildings at Madan Dutta Lane in Bowbazar last year has also been resolved.
Some challenges had to be witnessed during this metro construction route by engineers as the path from Howrah Maidan to Esplanade passes through very congested areas along the Brabourne Road in the Burrabazar area. It has many century-old houses that had to shift its residents to hotels nearby, during the ongoing underwater works. Well, they were given compensation for that.
Around 900,000 people daily shall be carried by the Metro which accounts roughly 20% of the city’s population. Its construction began some years ago and was expected to be closed by March this year, after a delay of several years of doubled costs.
A journey was made from Mahakaran to Howrah Maidan station by the General Railway Manager in Rake No. MR-612 to witness this event and the rake crossed river Hooghly at 11:55 hours. He was assisted by the Additional General Manager of Metro Railway and the MD of Kolkata Metro Railway Corporation Limited- H.N. Jaiswal with other senior officials and engineers during this travel. It is also reported that the GM offered puja at Howrah station once the metro rake reached there, according to his statement to media officials.
