Explained | Tracking the new railway proposal for Kerala Premium

Semi-high speed rail proposed in Kerala to cover 420-km Thiruvanthapuram-Kannur corridor in 3.5 hrs. Costing ₹1 lakh crore, the project has 15 stations every 30 km. SilverLine project met resistance.

The story so far: In Kerala, a new semi-high speed railway, expected to cruise at an average speed of 125 kmph has been proposed. Set to travel the 420-km Thiruvanthapuram-Kannur north-south corridor, the trains are slated to cover the distance in three and a half hours. The alignment for the trains will be largely that of the alignment suggested in 2015 for the high-speed rail corridor.

The approximately ₹1 lakh crore semi-high speed train project on standard gauge track was mooted recently by technocrat E. Sreedharan, a day after Kerala’s Representative in New Delhi K.V. Thomas called on him to elicit suggestions on a high-speed rail corridor. The new proposal is being projected as an alternative to the ₹64,000 crore Thiruvananthapuram-Kasaragod SilverLineproject, which was to cover the 530-km distance at an average speed of about 135 kmph, as per the Kerala Rail Development Corporation Ltd. (KRDCL).

The KRDCL had mooted 10 stations, each located approximately 55 km away, in the SilverLine alignment, while Mr. Sreedharan has cited the need for 15 stations located every 30 kms, to benefit more number of people. The proposed corridor would have a design speed of 200 kmph and can be linked with high-speed or semi-high speed rail projects on standard gauge that could touch Mangaluru and Coimbatore a few years down the lane. Referring to funding patterns, Mr. Sreesharan said that the Centre and State could pool in with ₹30,000 crore each, while ₹40,000 crore could be raised as loan.

Trains in Kerala are operating at rock-bottom speed. Even express trains in the State operate at an average speed of less than 50 kmph due to frequent stops, huge number of sharp curves and the 69-km Ambalapuzha-Thuravur stretch where track doubling work is pending. The average speed plummets further to approximately 35 kmph for short-distance passenger trains.

In 2014, the State government entrusted the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) with the task of readying a Detailed Project Report (DPR) for a high-speed rail corridor linking Thiruvananthapuram with the northern-most district Kasaragod. The DPR which was handed over to the government in 2015 was considered too ambitious and costly and failed to take off.

The SilverLineproject, proposed by the KRDCL in 2021, on the other hand, met with massive resistance, as it was to be built over a tall embankment constructed over the ground, and would have led to massive displacement of people. Environmental activists and others expressed fears that this would worsen flooding in many areas, since the embankment would block natural flow of water even if drains and canals were built at intervals. Mr. Sreedharan and other critics of SilverLine, said that the project’s DPR was flawed, while warning that its cost would exceed ₹1 lakh crore.

With two projects to speed up rail commute in the State failing to take off, along with the laboriously-slow pace of travel in trains and local buses, the people of Kerala have taken to cars and two-wheelers for inter-district commute. There are now 1.5 crore vehicles — one vehicle for every two persons — jostling for space on narrow and congested roads which claim the life of over 4,000 people in accidents every year in the State. It is in this context that Mr. Sreedharan has suggested a semi-high speed corridor. He stated that the DMRC was in a position to ready the DPR in 12 months, since it already has ground-level data collected for the high-speed rail corridor in 2015.