AGARTALA, Jan 23 � The Indian Railway Construction Company Ltd (IRCON) and the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) have jointly initiated the fixing of alignment for the proposed Agartala-Gangasagar rail link, official sources confirmed here.
Once the alignment is fixed, it will be put on the Revenue Map to undertake land acquisition process for the 15 km Indo-Bangla rail link will kick start, said Transport Secretary Kishore Ambuly.
While talking to the media at the Civil Secretariat here on Saturday, he said both IRCON and NFR have been working to materialise the dream rail project. A three-member team of IRCON-NFR headed by the General Manager Bijoy Behara met the Transport Secretary to discuss the project.
Ambuly said the IRCON, specialised in transport infrastructure, wants to set up an office at Badharghat to expedite the Indo-Bangla rail link. However, land for setting up the IRCON office has not been decided yet.
According to the joint survey, of the total 15 km proposed rail link, five km will be laid on the Indian side while the remaining 10 km will be established on Bangladesh soil. The rail link will be in BG format and the estimated cost of the Indo-Bangla rail link will be around Rs 252 crore.
The construction of two major tunnels at the NC Hills is expected to be completed by September and there will be no train service from October, 2014 to March 2015 between Lumding and Agartala to speed up the BG conversion work.
�Once the conversion work is done from Lumding to Agartala, the BG rail service will start, probably by April/ May�, Birji, who was here to review the progress of the conversion work, had said recently.
The NFR authority is worried about the construction work of the two tunnels in the NC Hill section. �We are on the move to construct two tunnels � one 3 km long and another 5 km to pave the way for BG conversion project at the earliest�, said an official.
After completing the BG conversion work up to Agartala, the NFR would speed up the rail extension work from Agartala to Sabroom with BG facility.
