Trains run on Ganga bridge, end 18-year-long wait

Patna/Chhapra: Thousands of residents on both sides of the Ganga cheered the historic moment when two passenger trains ran on the newly constructed Digha-Sonepur rail bridge on Wednesday, ending an 18-year-long wait. The trains were flagged off from Pataliputra and Chhapra stations under the East Central Railway (ECR) and North Eastern Railway (NER) zones repectively.
According to ECR CPRO Arvind Rajak, 400-odd passengers travelled in the eight coaches of Pataliputra-Barauni passenger train which left Pataliputra at 8.55am for its inaugural run on the bridge. The passengers included BJP functinaries like former deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, state BJP president Mangal Pandey and MLAs Nitin Navin, Prem Kumar, Asha Sinha and Sanjeev Chaurasia, who travelled up to Sonepur and had a feel of the train ride on the 4.5-km bridge. The train crossed the rail bridge around 9.10am amid thunderous cheers from the passengers.
Rajak said a section of locals forcibly stopped the train at 9.20am when it reached Pahleza Ghat where it remained stranded for four to five hours. The agitators, who were demanding renaming of Pahleza Ghat station as 'Bahpura' station, squatted on the tracks and did not relent even when Sonepur DRM N K Agarwal tried to pacify them.
Sources said Union minster Rajiv Pratap Rudy also tried to pacify the crowd, assuring them that he would look into the matter , but in vain. Later, the BJP leaders got down from the train and returned to Patna by road.
The agitators had on Tuesday ransacked Pahleza Ghat. The Sonepur SDO is said to have submitted a proposal to the railway administration for renaming Pahleza Ghat station.
On the other hand, the first passenger train from Chhapra side to cross the Ganga and reach Pataliputra using the new bridge was Gorakhpur-Thawe-Siwan-Chhapra-Sonepur train, which has been diverted from Parmanandpur to Pataliputra instead of going to Sonepur and vice versa. The train left Chhapra around 9am. "It is like a dream come true for us as we have been waiting for this bridge since my childhood," said Sushil Pandey (50), who travelled in the train from Chhapra to Pataliputra.
According to NER CPRO Sanjai Yadav, this train would cover a distance of about 65km from Chhapra to Pataliputra in about two hours.
The stone of the rail bridge was laid by the then Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda in 1997 when Ram Vilas Paswan was the railway minister, but the physical work on the bridge began in 2003 when Nitish Kumar, currently Bihar chief minister, was the railway minister. This historic day on February 3 reminded old-timers of the ordeal they would face while crossing the Ganga on steamers years ago. Later when Mahatma Gandhi Setu came up in the year 1982, people crossed the river by road, but soon traffic snarls made motoring on the road a painful experience for them.