Dedicated Freight Corridor: the First Quantum Building Block on the Inherited Legacy of the Railway Network in India

A well-spread railway network on multiple gauge in India is one of the few wonderful inheritances of legacy in an independent India. The network subsequently has had its incremental capacity upgradation by initiatives such as gauge conversion, doubling, dieselization and electrification over the last 65 years, with limited network expansion. The increased pace of development and economic growth in the last two decades of economic liberalization made the quantum capacity addition of rail freight transportation capacity an imperative need of the infrastructure, which is vital to a country like India with its vast geographical expanse. The Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) is the first step towards achieving a paradigm shift in freight transportation by developing a high-capacity backbone connecting the four cities of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai which, put together, carries nearly 60 percent of the freight transportation with less than 20 percent of route length. The corridor is being constructed for heavy- and long-haul operations with global convergence of technologies available across the world, with key players in heavy-haul/long-haul rail freight operations. The project implementation would obviously need global cooperation and participation to deliver the blend of the best in different aspects of freight transportation to meet this infrastructure capacity challenges of Indian Railway. On the operational front, against the present philosophy of every movement on the rails taking place on a specific command from a control centre through stations, DFC's operational philosophy is that wheels will keep moving unless a train is ordered to stop. Railways, being the most wonderful gift of the United Kingdom to the entire world (and the UK's being the first, obviously) are possessed with immense institutional knowledge and experience in different aspects of rail transportation, namely transport planning, network operation, network upgradation, privatization and public private partnerships. The DFC projects (the Eastern and Western Corridors now under implementation and the remaining four future corridors under project investigation) open immense opportunities for bilateral engagement of rail transport professionals from the UK and India which would be a great step forward in the direction of the recently concluded Memorandum of Understanding by the Prime Ministers of the two countries.