KOCHI: The last pre-stressed concrete girder of the 4.62-km-long rail bridge, the chief component of the railway line connecting the Vallarpadom International Container Transshipment Terminal with Edappally, was fixed on Friday.
The longest railway bridge in the country is now in Kochi. However, the bridge will be exclusively used for container traffic.
The Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL), which took up the the construction of the bridge in October 2007, completed the project in two years, building 190 metres of the bridge every month. Around 80 percent of the bridge is built in the backwaters.
At 133 locations, the bridge is built on pile foundations and is elevated 7.5 metres above the ground, except the entry and exit points. This facilitates transport along the water channel and road crossings at Mulavukad and Chittor.
The bridge has 132 spans, comprising 33 spans of 20 metres and 99 spans of 40 metres. The spans are made of PSC girders. A total of 231 girders, each weighing around 220 tonnes, were used for the construction of the bridge.
The girders were fixed using an automatic launching machinery imported from China. For the construction of the track, concrete sleepers of state-of-the-art design, modern rail fasteners and head-hardened rails are being used. Around 18,000 tonnes of steel and 50,000 tonnes of cement were used for the bridge, which has the provision additional track. The construction was carried out by Afcons Infrastructure Limited for the RVNL, involving around 700 labourers and 50 engineers.
“As targeted by the RVNL, rail connectivity to the container transshipment terminal could be established by December as only a small portion of the earth work and track work remain pending,” said RVNL deputy general manager G Kesavachandran.
Cochin Port Trust chairman N Ramachandran and other senior officials of the Port were present at the construction site when the last girder was fixed.