On Monday, the National High-Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) announced the initiation of the aerial LiDAR survey for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, once again. The survey will be conducted with the help of an aircraft that will mount the LiDAR equipment and the high-resolution camera. According to the NHRSCL, the aerial LiDAR survey that was first used on the same corridor, has recently been carried out for other proposed high-speed corridors in the country.
Ground profiling begins on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad HSR corridor
The NHSRCL spokesperson stated, "The Aerial LiDAR survey for capturing the data related to the vertical profile of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail (HSR) corridor, for 88 km between Ahmedabad and Vadodara and 237 km from Vadodara to Vapi, all in Gujarat, started on Monday."
This survey will help to set the vertical ground profile along the alignment, which will lay down the premise for the subsequent design, including the pillar design along the Mumbai-Ahmedabad HSR corridor. She further added that the aerial survey, with LiDAR equipment and a high-resolution camera mounted on aircraft, can cover 200 km alignment in a day and notified that "The required data is expected to be captured in two flights over 3-4 days."
Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train to cut transit time by 5 hours!
The Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project was commissioned by the Prime Minister on September 14, 2017, along with the then Prime Minister of Japan. They together laid the foundation stone of the ambitious ₹1.08 lakh crore ($17 billion) project, which aims to race through a 508 km stretch in about 2 hours.
The bullet trains plying on this high-speed corridor are expected to run at 32 km per hour, cutting down the transit time by 5 hours. Presently trains on this route take 7 hours to travel the distance, while flights take about 1 hour. As per reports, the initial deadline of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train project is December 2023.
Mumbai-based Larsen and Toubro in-charge of package tenders
The LiDAR survey is being carried out on the 325 km route under two tender packages, C-4 and C-6. As per the project blueprints, tender package C-6 is the third-longest package of the entire project and connects Vadodara with Ahmedabad through one station and a minor depot at Anand-Nadiad.
It involves design and construction of civil and building works, including testing and commissioning on design-build lump sum price basis for a double line high-speed railway involving 87.5 km of viaducts and bridges, 25 crossing bridges, a tunnel, 97.50 km of roads, one station, a maintenance depot, 4 sub-maintenance depots and a host of other associated structures. The C-6 package tender was awarded to Larsen and Toubro, an Indian multinational technology, engineering, construction, manufacturing and financial services conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, in November last year.
The L&T has also bagged the C-4 package of Rs 24,985 crore that constitutes 46.66 per cent of the project last year. The C-4 tender package between Vapi (Zaroli Village on Maharashtra-Gujarat Border) and Vadodara in the state of Gujarat includes four stations namely Vapi, Billimora, Surat and Bharuch and Surat Depot. This too was awarded to the L&T last year, in December.
