By the autumn of 1997, trains could run along almost the entire length of India's new west-coast railway, from Roha south of Mumbai to the edge of Mangalore. What they could not do was run through. A single tunnel at Pernem, on the Goa border, kept caving in and flooding, and through services between Mumbai and Mangalore waited on it for months. It was finally finished in January 1998, some six years after work on it began.
That one stubborn bore says a great deal about the Konkan Railway: roughly 740 kilometres of line, around 2,000 bridges and more than 90 tunnels, driven through the Western Ghats and their monsoon in about seven years. It is the line that gave the Konkan coast its first railway, and it is the reason a luxury train such as the Deccan Odyssey can travel between Goa and Mumbai along the shore at all.
A coast the railway age passed by
For most of the modern era the Konkan, the narrow strip of coast between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, had no railway running along it. The British, who built most of India's network, never laid one here. The coast is cut every few kilometres by rivers running off the Ghats, the hills come down almost to the sea, and the monsoon is among the heaviest in the country. Travellers between Mumbai and Mangalore went by sea, by road, or by long inland detours.
The idea was not new. A coastal line was surveyed as early as 1920, an aerial survey of the stretch between Dasgaon and Mangalore was flown in 1957, and engineering and traffic surveys were carried out between 1970 and 1972. A short first phase from Apta to Roha made it into the railway budget of 1978-79. The rest stayed on paper for want of money.
A minister, an engineer and an unusual company
What finally moved the project was a combination of political will and an unconventional financial structure. According to a 2014 Business Standard account, E. Sreedharan, then member-engineering of the Railway Board and days from retirement, put the idea of a coastal railway to the railway minister, George Fernandes, who came from Udupi on that coast. Sreedharan's proposal was unusual in two ways: it was to be built on a build-operate-transfer basis, with roughly two-thirds of the money raised from outside the government, and it was to run straight through the forests and hills rather than around them.
Konkan Railway Corporation Limited was incorporated on 19 July 1990 as a separate public-sector company, a departure from the practice of building lines through the railway ministry itself. Its shareholders were the Government of India and the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa and Kerala. Sreedharan became its first chairman and managing director, reportedly on condition that he could choose his own team and work without ministry interference. Business Standard dates the foundation stone to 15 October 1990; at least one other account gives September.
Ninety-two tunnels and two thousand bridges
The figures vary slightly from source to source, but the scale does not. The line required more than 2,000 bridges and around 91 or 92 tunnels. Its longest tunnel, at Karbude near Ratnagiri, runs for about 6.5 kilometres and was at the time the longest railway tunnel in India. Its longest bridge crosses the Sharavathi river in Karnataka at just over two kilometres. Land was bought from some 43,000 owners, largely within a year.
The engineering methods were as notable as the numbers. Piers for the major river bridges were cast on the banks and floated into position with pontoon-mounted cranes, and the project is credited with India's first use of incremental launching, in which a bridge deck is built in sections on land and pushed out across its piers. Tunnelling equipment was imported from Sweden.
The soft-soil tunnels
The machines were of little use in the nine tunnels driven through saturated clay beneath a high water table. These were dug largely by hand, metre by metre, and several collapsed as soon as they were excavated and had to be dug again. Nineteen lives and four years were lost on the soft-soil tunnels alone. One engineer working on the Pernem tunnel was buried chest-deep in a collapse and dug out by a colleague, who received a bravery award. The overall death toll is given differently by different sources: seventy-four in one widely cited account, ninety-three in the figure quoted by Business Standard. Either way, it was not cheaply bought.
The viaduct and the Qutub Minar
The structure most often photographed is the Panval Nadi viaduct near Ratnagiri, roughly 424 metres long, carrying the single broad-gauge track across a deep valley between two hills. It was long described as the highest railway viaduct in India, a title it held until 2010, when newer structures in Jammu and Kashmir overtook it; the Chenab Bridge, which Konkan Railway itself helped design and build, has since far surpassed it.
A popular claim holds that six of the viaduct's piers are taller than the Qutub Minar in Delhi, which stands at about 73 metres. Other accounts put the tallest piers at around 64 metres. The comparison makes a good story but should be treated with caution; the two figures cannot both be right.
Money, bonds and a line opened in pieces
The engineering was only half the problem. When the seed capital from the central and state governments ran out, the corporation was left with little to build with, and the stock-market scandal of the early 1990s made investors wary of new instruments. The government's answer was to allow it to issue tax-free bonds, a facility otherwise reserved for housing, power and finance companies. Young engineers later recalled selling bonds to local people after work. The interest on them became a long-term burden; the company first turned a profit only in 2009-10.
The line opened in sections as the money and the tunnels allowed:
- 20 March 1993 - first passenger train, between Mangalore and Udupi
- June 1993 - northern section from Roha to Veer opens
- December 1996 - service extended 286 km from Khed to Sawantwadi Road
- August 1997 - southern services reach Pernem in Goa
- 26 January 1998 - full line from Roha inaugurated once the Pernem tunnel is complete
- May 1998 - through passenger service between Mumbai and Mangalore begins
Sreedharan later recalled that a senior railway finance official had predicted the line would not be finished in 25 years. "We did it in seven years," he told Business Standard. He went on to lead the construction of the Delhi Metro.
Living with the monsoon
Completion did not end the struggle with the terrain. In the 1998 monsoon, its first year of full operation, landslides washed away sections of track. The corporation responded with protective netting along cuttings to stop boulders reaching the track and, notably, with its own research. Konkan Railway developed an indigenous anti-collision device and introduced India's first roll-on, roll-off freight service in 1999, carrying loaded lorries on flat wagons between Kolad and Verna in Goa. The line still runs to a separate, slower monsoon timetable.
Travelling the Konkan line today
The result is one of the most rewarding stretches of railway in India: estuaries, paddy fields and laterite cuttings, punctuated by tunnel after tunnel and long, high valley crossings. The Deccan Odyssey, Maharashtra's luxury train, makes the most of it. Its Maharashtra Splendor itinerary runs from Mumbai inland to the caves and temples of the Deccan, down to Goa, and back north along the coast by way of Sindhudurg, which puts the Konkan alignment at the heart of the journey.
The Konkan story sits naturally beside India's other great rail ventures. The Maharajas' Express and the Palace on Wheels work the older lines of the north and Rajasthan, and our overview of luxury trains of India sets them side by side. For another feat of mountain engineering, see building a railway at 4,000 metres in the Peruvian Andes. The full collection is under our trains, and more histories are in the Journal.
