Rail line up to China border: Final location survey to begin soon

“The Railway Board has recently issued a letter for conducting the final location survey of the proposed railway line up to Tawang. The survey, which will be conducted jointly by the railways with the government of Arunachal Pradesh and the Defence Ministry, will look at identifying the best alignment, combining it with the existing Tezpur-Tawang road wherever necessary,” R S Virdi told The Indian Express.

“The Railways is expecting the Defence Ministry to release funds for the survey because of its strategic location and also because the armed forces stand to benefit the most from it,” he said.

“It will be a major national project both because of its strategic importance as well as because of the daunting task of negotiating the steep Eastern Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh,” Virdi said.

While Naharlagun, 10 km short of Itanagar, was last year connected to the Railway network (Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the first two trains on February 20, 2015), the Railways have two more projects in the pipeline for the frontier state, Virdi said.

“We will soon begin survey for the proposed 256-km Murkongselek-Pasighat-Tezu-Rupai line too, while we are also expecting to get the green signal for the survey of the 248-km Silapathar-Aalo-Lakhimpur line. While Murkongselek to Rupai is by and large plain area along the inter-state boundary with Assam, the other line will go up from Silapathar in the Assam plains to about 620 metres to Aalo and then return to Lakhimpur,” he added.