Khulna-Kolkata rail service to be opened Thursday

Desk Report: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is set to jointly launch Thursday with her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi the Khulna-Kolkata train service and open two bridges on railway routes connecting Dhaka with Sylhet and Chittagong.

Officials said the two premiers would inaugurate the projects through a videoconferencing from Dhaka and New Delhi when they would also launch an "end to end" immigration facility to ease Dhaka-Kolkata Moitree Train services.

Railway officials said the two new bridges were built on the Bhairab and Titas rivers as a second track was constructed for simultaneous operation of up and down train services from Dhaka to Chittagong and Sylhet.

"We will call the new structures as the second Bhairab Bridge and second Titas bridge," a railway official familiar with the process said.

He said the train to operate on the 177 kilometres Khulna-Kolkata route would be dubbed as "Bandhan Express" while the service was being launched to ease further communication between the two neighbouring countries.

The train on the route, however, would start ferrying passengers from November 16 and according to the schedule, it would leave Kolkata at 11 am (Indian time) and reach Khulna within only four and a half hours.

The two railway bridges were constructed with the Indian Line of Credit (LoC).

The 984-meter long and seven-meter width Bhairab Railway Bridge was built at a cost of Tk 567 crore, while its construction work began on December 25 in 2013 and ended last month.

Under an agreement with Bangladesh government, India's Ircon-Afcons JV constructed the bridge having both dual gauge and broad-gauge facilities.

The new Titas Bridge is 218-meter in length and 7-meter in width while it was built at a cost of Tk 161.36 crore by another Indian company called Gannon-Flcl Consortium under a nearly identical agreement with the government.

The construction work of the second Titas Bridge started on January 27 in 2014 and ended last month.

BSS


risingbd/Dhaka/Nov 8, 2017/Nasim