Fifty years ago | Asia’s longest rail-cum-road bride on the Godavari

Rajahmundry, November 17: The second Godavari bridge is the longest rail-cum-road bridge in Asia. The 9,594 -feet-long bridge has been constructed at an expenditure of Rs. 10.5 crores excluding the cost of road approaches, in 10 years time.

The bridge will fulfill the traffic needs of the area and will reduce the transport bottlenecks on the arterial trunk route from Madras to Howrah, one of the busiest trunk routes of the Indian Railways system.

The Gudur-Waltair section of the Madras-Howrah trunk route has till now constituted a bottleneck on the South Central Railway.

The phenomenal increase of traffic, both passenger and goods on this route since Independence, placed a pressing demand for increase in the line capacity. The doubling of track between Madras and Waltair was conceived in this context and executed in patches progressively since 1955. The construction of two new bridges across the rivers Krishna and Godavari were the main features of this doubling. The second Krishna bridge had already been completed in 1965.

The work on the second Godavari bridge was taken up in October 1964. The existing railway bridge on the Godavari, constructed in the year 1906, has been causing anxiety since its construction. Speed restrictions had to be imposed for traffic on this bridge and under high flood conditions, the speed limit had to be kept at as low as 10 km p.h.

Published - November 18, 2024 04:19 am IST