Move to build two rail bridges over Meghna, Gumti rivers

The Bangladesh Railway has taken a move to construct two separate rail bridges over the Meghna and the Meghna-Gumti rivers.
The new move was taken as a technical committee has ruled out the possibility of establishing rail-cum-road bridges over the rivers as it is being planned for the Padma bridge to reduce cost and land use.
The committee worked on the prime minister's directive in October last to consider rail-cum-road bridges over the Meghna and the Meghna- Gumti rivers.
The technical committee, formed under the Bangladesh Railway (BR), reported that from technical and financial points of view, the concept of using the same bridge for both rail and road traffic movement would not be viable.
An official said, the prime minister on July 9 also approved the recommendation of the technical committee after the Ministry of Railway submitted the report.
At present, the process of construction of two new bridges beside the existing Meghna and Meghna-Gumti bridges has begun. The Roads and Highways Department (RHD) is planning to construct the two more bridges to establish the Dhaka-Chittagong expressway.
The BR will now have to construct two more rail bridges, apart from existing bridges, to establish high-speed train service on the Dhaka-Chittagong highway.
According to officials, the five-member technical committee, headed by the BR Director General, was formed during a meeting with the prime minister on October 8, 2015 to find ways to use the same land and the same bridges to implement the BR's express rail and RHD's expressway road.
They said, the committee found that vertical slope, horizontal curve and design patters of the two kinds of transport system are different and hard to coordinate.
Besides, implementation pattern and modality of the Dhaka-Chittagong expressway are also different from that of expressway rail.
The RHD project is being implemented on public-private partnership basis while the BR's one is expected to be implemented under government-to-government arrangement.
A Chinese company has already submitted a pre-feasibility report in this regard.
"If the two projects need to accommodate the same bridges, the Dhaka-Chittagong expressway project will be delayed by six to eight months," said an official, engaged in the RHD project
An official of the Ministry of Railway said, upon the technical committee recommendation, efforts are also being made to see the possibility of constructing the expressway rail bridge beside the Dhaka-Chittagong expressway bridge to use same land and river training work.
He said on the PM's approval in principle, separate railway bridges over the two rivers have been planned to set up tracks for bullet trains.
The BR has taken a move to establish bullet train on the Dhaka-Chittagong corridor on the PM's directives in 2014 to reduce the train journey time to two hours.
The BR is yet to start its own feasibility study to assess viability of the Chinese proposal.
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