Putting a question mark over the proposed alignment of the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) along existing tracks over a distance of 2,762 km, officials of the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd (DFCCIL) have pointed out to the Railway Board that the task appears to be enormous if not impossible.

For this, they have said, the Indian Railways will need to negotiate 3,407 bridges, roughly a bridge every 0.9 km. Not just that, trying to accommodate the DFC parallel to the existing route means that the Railways will need 12 years to extend just the 3,041 minor bridges on the Eastern and Western routes.

Bringing out the enormity of the task, DFCCIL officials are learnt to have suggested that planning the DFC alongside existing alignments — as proposed by RITES — will not only mean longer construction periods but also a lot of inconvenience to passenger trains, resulting in longer travel times due to imposition of speed restrictions. It would also mean largescale dismantling, relocation and curtailment of passenger facilities and disruption of traffic.

According to DFCCIL’s internal reports submitted to Rail Bhavan, the Eastern and Western corridors have 366 important and major bridges and 3,041 minor bridges. In case the Railways agrees to the alignment proposed by RITES, speed restrictions will need to be imposed to dismantle various portions of the minor bridges, the DFCCIL officials said. “Technically speaking, there are no problems which cannot be overcome. Construction of bridges is not an issue since we do not want to come very close to the existing alignment,” DFCCIL’s managing director V K Kaul said on Saturday.

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