Revealed: At Rameshwaram, India is building an engineering marvel

A vertical lift rail bridge, the first of its kind in India, is coming up to connect the island of Rameshwaram off Tamil Nadu with the mainland. It will replace the old Pamban cantilever bridge built the British in 1914.

The new 2.07-kilometre bridge, an engineering marvel, will move up to let ships and cruisers pass through as compared to spans lifting on both sides in the earlier structure, now majorly corroded due to the corrosive seas.

According to the Railway Ministry, the new Pamban bridge will be three meters higher than the old one, with a navigational air clearance of 22 meters allowing safe passage to ships.

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It will have 99 spans of 18.3m length and one navigational span of 72.5m length.

The new bridge will also let trains run at 80 km per hour. This will be a boon to pilgrims proceeding to Rameshwaram and Dhanushkodi.

The old structure was severely damaged by a devastating cyclone in December 1964 that not only flattened the tiny island of Dhanuskodi but overturned the Pamban-Dhanushkodi passenger train killing more than 200 passengers.

It was restored in less than 50 days by a team of engineers led by E Sreedharan, who later went to build the now famed Delhi Metro.

The new bridge is expected to be ready by March 2023. A string of tests will then be conducted to check the load-bearing capacity and other factors.

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Once completed at an estimated cost of Rs 280 crore, it will become India’s first Vertical Lift Railway Sea Bridge.

The construction is being done by the Railway Vikas Nigam Ltd or RVNL, a public sector undertaking.

Rail traffic on the old bridge was suspended after the monitoring system sent out a red alert last month.

The new bridge will open for train traffic once it is certified fit, to carry passengers.

“As the bridge will lift up vertically, a full horizontal width of 72.5 m will be available for navigation. This means ships large in size can also pass the Rameswaram coast now”, a railway official said.

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The superstructure of the new bridge is made of steel girder, while the sub-structure is made of reinforced cement concrete.

The work started in 2020 and was to end by 2021 end but got hit by Covid-19 lockdown and more.

The old bridge was operated manually while the new one will have electro-mechanical controlled systems and they will be interlocked with train control systems.

So what will happen to the old bridge? Nothing has been decided yet. Either it will remain as a heritage structure or it will be dismantled.