Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday inaugurated India’s longest railroad bridge, Bogibeel bridge, in Dibrugarh on Tuesday. The bridge was inaugurated 21 years after its foundation stone was laid. The double-decker bridge, the fourth across the Brahmaputra, has two railway lines on the lower deck and a three-lane road on the upper, strong enough to withstand movement of even heavy military tanks.
The 4.94 km bridge, built at a cost of Rs 5,900 crore by the Indian Railways, will reduce travel time from Assam to Arunachal Pradesh to four hours and will also cut down train travel between Delhi to Dibrugarh by three hours. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will green-flag the traffic on the bridge, opening it for the public.
The Bogibeel Bridge, which will have a serviceable period of around 120 years, is India’s only fully welded bridge for which European welding standards were adhered to for the first time in the country. The bridge has 39 girders of 125 meter and 2 girders of 33-meter span. The girders have steel floor system for railway tracks and concrete for the road. This type of structure was constructed for the first time on Indian Railways.
Ahead of the construction, one of the biggest challenges was the transportation of concrete across river channels of 600 meter to 900-meter width. To overcome this, concrete was pumped through pipeline laid over buoys. State of the art machinery and welding equipment were used for the execution of welding work.
