All nine river bridges between Vapi and Surat have been completed, NHSRCL said

Construction of 12 out of 20 river bridges in Gujarat for the 508-km Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor has been completed.

The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) on Sunday (November 3) said that the 120-metre bridge over the Harera River in Navsari district has become the twelfth bridge to be completed under the project in Gujarat recently.

Spanning 352 km in Gujarat and 156 km in Maharashtra, the bullet train project includes 12 stations planned at Mumbai, Thane, Virar, Boisar, Vapi, Bilimora, Surat, Bharuch, Vadodara, Anandi/Nadia, Ahmedabad and Sabarmati.

Once launched, the bullet train is expected to reduce the travel time between Ahmedabad and Mumbai to around 3 hours from the current 6-8 hours.

“All the nine river bridges between Vapi and Surat stations on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor are now complete. The recently completed bridge over the Harera River at Navsara is 120 meters long, making the total number of completed river bridges 12 out of 20 in Gujarat,” NHSRCL said in a post on X.

The Harera River is a tributary of the Ambika River, which originates in the hills of Vansda taluk, located near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border.

The river is located approximately 45 km from Vapi Express Train Station and 6 km from Bilimora Station.

Apart from Harera, bridges were also constructed on Par, Purna, Mindhola, Ambika, Auranga, Kolak, Kaveri and Vengania rivers between Vapi and Surat.

The NHSRCL statement also said that 16 km of the total length of 21 km of the tunnel is planned to be constructed using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) and the remaining 5 km using the New Austrian Tunneling Method (NATM), the news agency said. PTI reported.

Taking into account ground conditions and reliability, slurry-type BMPs with a cutting head diameter of 13.6 m are being purchased.

“Work is nearing completion on the three shafts for lowering and extracting the TBM. In addition, to speed up the work, the construction of the 394 m long additional through tunnel (ADIT) has already been completed, and to speed up the work, tunneling through NATM has started simultaneously in three faces,” the statement said.