Pir Panjal tunnel likely to get on track by 2011

“Day break” marks the completion of tunnelling from two opposite faces. Conventionally,the tunnelling work is conducted from both ends of the tunnel. But this being a very long tunnel,Railways decided to engage in simultaneous working at more than two faces by constructing a shaft towards the North end and an adit towards the South end. “Opening up of more working faces in this tunnel will enable us to complete construction in five years instead of the seven it would have taken had we followed the conventional method,” an official from IRCON,the Railway PSU constructing the tunnel,said.

Tunnelling from the South face and from the South side adit was completed on Saturday with a huge explosion inside the tunnel. As hundreds of workers cheered deep inside the Pir Panjal tunnel,huge machines removed the debris making both ends meet. Railway Board’s Member Engineering Rakesh Chopra,alongwith senior Northern Railway officials and those from IRCON were present inside the tunnel,a good 440 metres below the 2.75-km long Jawahar tunnel that connects Jammu to the Kashmir Valley.

Costing around Rs 647 crore,the Pir Panjal tunnel will also have a three-metre wide road for maintenance,emergencies,rescue and relief operations. A whopping 10 lakh cubic metre of earth would have been dug out by the time the construction finishes.

Adopting state-of-the-art technology to ensure proper ventilation,fire-fighting and safety monitoring,Indian Railways is using PVC membranes to line the insides of the tunnel so as to make it waterproof. It used the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) to construct this tunnel deploying equipment like “road headers” for excavation.