Dedicated Freight Corridor

Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC):

In India, we have the Golden Quadrilateral Corridor of transportation connected by roadway and railway. The roadway and railway have seen a great increase in freight, but the percentage of goods transported by train has shifted to the roadway which needed a renovation of the railway system.

The passenger and freight trains run on the same tracks and thus the efficiency of the system was less. The idea of having different tracks for the passenger and freight trains were put forward and the ministry of transportation started to plan a dedicated corridor for the freight trains which will eventually reduce the traffic on the existing track and help in achieving higher speeds and more trains for movement of goods and people.

The plan was to have dual-track which will run parallel to the existing track and divided as Western and Eastern Freight Corridor and is estimated to be worth 81459 crores completely of which Japan International Cooperation Agency will be providing 38000 crores for the complete western freight corridor as a loan where Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor is funded by the World Bank and has a private-public partnership. Also, this is the vision of our Prime Minister Shree Narendra Modi and Make In India initiative to increase the efficiency and productivity of our home country goods and services and will be completed by April/March 2020.
The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor is built along the key transportation route Mumbai to Delhi further connecting to the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor which is along with Delhi, Howrah, and Chennai. The two-line are also connected diagonally which completes the picture of Golden Quadrilateral.

Need Of Dedicated Freight Corridor:

India's four metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Howrah near Kolkata are linked with roads and railways. The existing truck routes of the Western and Eastern part of the Golden Quadrilateral are highly saturated.
DFC will adopt a state of the art technology and world-class modification, changing the basic design features like increasing the height and width of the rakes, more than doubling the trainload from 5000 ton to 13000 ton, and increasing average speed to almost 3 times the existing speed which will bring monumental change in the movement of freight along with the railway network.

The use of Engineering technology and new techniques will be used in the construction of the tracks and bridges and culverts. The tracks which are usually 85 meters long will be welded and made of 150 to 300 meter long tracks. The Tracks are also laid with help of new machine which will also be adjusted by machine trains. The tracks are built to hold more axial weight than the previous ones. The bridges are also constructed to hold more weight. The culverts are also build to restrict the flow of other traffic which will not reduce the average speed.

The Salient Features of the Dedicated Freight Corridor are:

• The height of the existing track will be increased from 4.265 m to 5.1 and 7.1 m for Eastern and Western respectively.
• The width will be increased from 3.2 m to 3.66 m.
• The tracks and the trains will be capable of moving with Double Stack containers.
• The length of the train will be increased to 1500 m from 700 m now.
• The load capacity will be increased from 5000 tons to 13000 tons.
• This will be the more reliable and economical route for the consumer and seller. 
• Possibility to run scheduled freight trains.
• The trains can run for 70 km and in testing the value even reached 100 kmph. This will reduce road congestion, accidents, and ensure no wastage of energy and security.
• This will help in creating industrial hubs along with the freight corridor opening doors to more employment and as the goods traffic will shift to DFC it will also help in improving the punctuality of the passenger trains.

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