Coal will now reach the power plants in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in half the time as the entire stretch of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) between Bihar and Punjab is complete.
The 1,337-km EDFC, meant only for freight trains, between Sonnagar in Bihar and Sahnewal near Ludhiana, will see freight trains loaded with coal from eastern and central coalfields and meant for the power plants in north India run at top speeds of 60-70 kmph, since they will not have to jostle for space with passenger trains, like in the conventional railway network.
“This is like the express highway for trains. The moment they come to our network, the freight trains are able to run at double the usual speed,” Ravindra Kumar Jain, managing director, EDFC, told INDIA TODAY.
The east-to-north railway freight route is the lifeline for coal from eastern and central coalfields to the thermal power plants. However, the line-capacity utilisation of the conventional main railway line, which is the Delhi-Howrah Grand Chord, is saturated at around 120 per cent, thanks to the growing number of trains—both freight and passenger—over the years.
The freight corridor was designed to take most of the goods traffic out of this line and help reduce congestion and increase speeds for passenger trains on the conventional Indian Railway network, while reducing the time taken to transport goods significantly.
With the entire corridor now complete, the option to progressively implement that vision is ready, officials said. “For loaded freight trains bringing coal from the eastern side, the time is reduced to 20 hours from the current 40 on the conventional Indian Railways network. For other shorter distances, the time is reduced from 20 hours to 10 and so on,” Jain said.
The corridor is designed for a maximum speed of 100 kmph, but that is a tall order for current freight trains, which are allowed to hit a top speed of around 60-70 kmph when loaded. Generally, in the regular railway network, the loaded freight trains are able to clock much less than that, often crawling at 25 kmph or so.
However, the empty rakes, after unloading, return at a speed of 100 kmph on the DFC, officials said, which reduces the turnaround time of rakes and increases overall capacity. The various stretches of the EDFC have been completed in stages over the past couple of years.
A freight train was sent on a trial run on the 401-km section between Sahnewal and New Khurja in western Uttar Pradesh earlier this week, officials said, marking the completion of all the stretches. “Currently we are running 70 trains one way every day. By the end of the financial year, we are hoping to touch the maximum capacity of running 120 trains per day each way,” Jain said.
Coal rakes from the eastern coalfields will travel through Jharkhand and enter the EDFC mostly through Sonnagar, while those from the central and northern coalfields will connect to the corridor using critical feeder routes such as the 44-km Tori-Shivpur line in Jharkhand and Chopan-Chunar line in Uttar Pradesh, before travelling northwards. The power utilities in UP, Haryana and Punjab account for almost 70 per cent of the installed capacity of coal-based power plants in the northern region.
The higher speeds on the corridor are enabled also by tracks being capable of heavier loads and the signalling system that has less requirement for trains to slow down en route. Unlike the conventional network, the DFC has signalling every 2 km, which also allows better operational visibility to loco drivers. “During the fog months, we have the advantage that there are signals every 2 km and the fact that there is no passenger train to share the line with. This enables more seamless and faster movement even in poor visibility conditions,” he said.
Banking on the capacity of the two arms of the DFC—the EDFC and the 1500-km Western Dedicated Freight Corridor between Dadri in UP and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Maharashtra, which is around 70 per cent complete—the railways has planned to upgrade its coal-carrying ability over the next few years.
This financial year, the national transporter is likely to induct about 200 new rakes for coal, which could provide additional 50 rakes per day of coal to power plants, translating to an additional loading of about 70 million tonnes. Over the next two years, the capacity to transport coal alone is planned to be augmented by around 185 million tonnes.
The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited (DFCCIL) has said that by March 2024, both the corridors will be operational. The railways carried 728 million tonnes of coal across India last financial year, of which around 580 million tonnes were to the power plants.
The EDFC has been built at a cost of around Rs 51,000 crore with assistance from the World Bank. The other arm, the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, is being built at a cost of around Rs 72,000 crore with a loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
As per plans, the EDFC was supposed to extend another 538 km to Dankuni in West Bengal via Gomoh in Jharkhand. However, the DFCCIL will not be building it as the railways has other plans for the stretch, officials said.
The company said more than 95 per cent of the total DFC will be completed by March 2024. Announced in 2005-06 in the railway budget, the DFCs have faced inordinate delays over the years. Construction picked up paced under the present Union government, with various sections of the corridors being commissioned from to time. The DFC is vital to the National Logistics Policy, which aims to reduce the cost of logistics from 15 per cent of the country’s GDP to 8 per cent by 2030.
