Kolkata: East-West Metro may have passed the cave-in zone test ahead of the much-awaited under-river launch. Sources said the safety team has given positive feedback of their inspection to usher the final safety visit – by their chief on Monday.
But the chief commissioner of railway safety (CCRS), after trolley runs of the 4.8km Esplanade-Howrah Maidan stretch via the twin 520m river tunnels, will also do a trolley run through the eastbound tunnel in the troubled Esplanade-Sealdah section to check for himself if empty rakes can be seamlessly moved through this section. He will end his three-day inspection of Kolkata’s new Metro lines with the Orange line’s New Garia-Ruby section’s signalling system on Tuesday.
TOI on Wednesday (Jan 31) reported that the CCRS had sent a team for trolley inspection of the eastbound tunnel in the subsidence-ridden Esplanade-Sealdah section. The under-river operations would require empty rakes to be transported through this section from the Central Park depot. There is no such facility on the Howrah side for the BEML rakes. East-West Metro’s truncated 4.8km Esplanade-Howrah Maidan section has missed the Dec deadline and is undergoing repeated safety inspections since Dec 15. Kolkata’s Line 2, or the Green line, partially runs 9.2km between Sector V and Sealdah. Work is pending in the 2.5km Sealdah-Esplanade section that passed through the subsidence-ridden Bowbazar area in central Kolkata. Implementing agency Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC) is skipping the Sealdah-Esplanade section for now and focusing on a truncated 4.8km Esplanade-Howrah Maidan section via the Hooghly.
The commission of railway safety (CRS), which gives the final approval for any new Metro line, was irked at the sorry state of the section. The first CRS team called off its inspection mid-way on Dec 18, seeing that track-laying was still incomplete on the eastward tunnel. The Rs 10,000-crore Metro project suffered a major setback since Aug 2019 because the tunnel boring machine (TBM) digging the westbound tunnel hit an aquifer, causing largescale subsidence in the Bowbazar area. The westbound tunnel is incomplete. The eastbound one is relatively complete.
KMRC has now retrofitted half-rings made of very strong steel to bridge around 40m gaps at three places of the eastbound tunnel. On Jan 16, four rakes were transported through it. The last time rakes moved in this section was in April 2023 for trials in the Esplanade-Howrah Maidan section. The rakes were then pulled by a battery-run locomotive. Now they can be driven through by electricity drawn from the third rail along the eastbound tunnel.
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