Hispeed rail to turn into metro in Meerut
NEWDELHI: A high-speed rail corridor from Delhi will double up as a local metro for Meerut, officials of the executing agency have said, explaining a tweak that will help save the government ₹6,300 crore and improve the efficiency of a network expected to carry hundreds of thousands of passengers every day.
After Delhi and its immediate suburbs of Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida, Meerut is the most populated National Capital Region (NCR) town from where 740,000 people are expected to travel daily once the regional rail transit system (RRTS) is built.
The RRTS is expected to cut travel time from Meerut to Delhi by more than half to roughly 60 minutes, and help ease the heavy
TWEAK EXPECTED TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT ₹6,300 CRORE
AND IMPROVE THE NETWORK’S EFFICIENCY
road traffic on the 90-km stretch.
The National Capital Region Transport Corporation Limited, which is executing the RRTS project, will build six more stations in Meerut and parallel tracks that will accommodate the metro trains, an officer said. An NCRTC spokesperson confirmed the decision and said it was made after the agency was told that its network would overlap with a part of the local metro network proposed to be built by the Uttar Pradesh government.
That part, corridor 1 of the Meerut metro, was supposed to have 16 stations passing from the same localities through which the RRTS would cut through.
“It has been decided that in Meerut, we will construct parallel lines and metro trains will be purchased for that. While the RRTS train will not stop at these extra stations, there will be interchange facility at six other stations where the rapid train from Delhi will stop,” the spokesperson said. According to the new design, the 92.6-km long corridor will technically marry the metro networks of Delhi (at Sarai Kale Khan on the Pink Line) with Meerut’s at Partapur.
The estimated cost of Meerut’s corridor 1 from Partapur to Modipuram, the overlapping stretch, was Rs 8,388 crore. But its integration with the RRTS network, according to the new plan, is expected to cost ₹2,100 crore.