India’s first railway station inside tunnel to come up in Himachal

For the first time in India, a railway station will be built inside a tunnel at a height of 3,000 metres, on the strategic Bilaspur-Manali-Leh line close to the Sino-India border. Once completed, the Keylong station in Himachal Pradesh will be the first on the railway network to be inside a tunnel. Keylong is the administrative centre of Lahaul and Spiti district, 26 km north of Manali and 120 km from the Indo-Tibetan border.

“The Keylong station, in the project, will be inside the tunnel according to the first phase of the location survey. This will be the first such railway station in the country. As and when the final surveys are completed, there could be many such stations on the route,” D R Gupta, chief engineer construction, Northern Railway, told PTI.

The station will be at a height of around 3,000 metres and will be inside a 27-km-long tunnel. The railway line will connect all important locations between Bilaspur and Leh like Sundernagar, Mandi, Manali, Keylong, Koksar, Darcha, Upshi and Karu and other towns of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

The project will include 74 tunnels, 124 major bridges and 396 minor bridges, according to the first phase of the survey. Once finished, the line will halve the duration taken to cover the distance between Delhi and Leh, from 40 hours to 20 hours. The final location survey is expected to be completed in 30 months, after which a detailed project report will be finalised.