Mumbai: It will take Western Railway (WR) at least a year and a total of 70 hours in blocks to build a new Parel-Elphinstone foot overbridge (FOB) that can accommodate peak-hour crowds, sources have said. In the wake of the Elphinstone Road stampede, in which 23 lives were lost, the Railway ministry launched an inquiry into the 18-month delay in issuing tenders for the bridge. The then-railway minister Suresh Prabhu approved the project in January 2015.
The WR has already been brainstorming on how to go about constructing the bridge and officials have said the only way forward is to increase the number of blocks. An official said, “We, in fact, get less than four hours of night blocks to work on the major construction work that we take up. This is because we have to wait till the last train from Churchgate reaches Virar to start doing crucial work.”
The official said, “We will try minimise the number of blocks or limit them, but we will require almost 70 hours to do the work needed to build the Elphinstone FOB.”
The WR in fact has even begun to advance the departure of its last local train by 30 minutes after some of its senior officials complained about the lack of available maintenance time to Union minister Piyush Goyal in a Railway Board meeting held at Churchgate a day after the tragedy.
The WR had also run into controversy after the tender for the Elphinstone bridge was uploaded on its website a day after the stampede.
Officials have said that the Parel end of the bridge will be built in co-ordination with the Central Railway (CR). “We will complete the bridge in a year in light of all our limitations. It is the need of the hour and we will be working with the CR and, off course, work has to be done to make sure no safety violations or infringements occur while it is running its trains,” said the official.
The WR submitted a 200-page audit report to general manager A.K. Gupta on Friday night, said sources. Mr Gupta will now be going through the report and making final changes before submitting to the Railway Board sometime in the coming week.
