Ahmedabad Metro Rail tunnel construction work updates
The construction of the tunnel for the underground section of the Ahmedabad Metro Rail will begin next week. The tunnel will be built 20 meters below the surface. Of the total length of the 39.25km Metro rail network, the underground section has a length of 6.33 kilometers. The section is located in the walled part of Ahmedabad, which has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. To avoid damage to monuments and heritage structures, the underground train will run on a zigzag route, specially designed for that purpose.
“The underground route could have been simple and straight, but to protect the heritage monuments, we have designed a zigzag route,” said IP Gautam, managing director of Metro Link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad (MEGA) Company Limited. “Development is inevitable, but there are ways to avoid interruptions, instead of a direct route from Kalupur to Shahpur, we have taken it through Kanta.”
The underground section of the Metro railroad will be between 12 and 20 meters below the surface, with four stations between 12 and 15 meters below the surface. “Decide that the route was complex, as it is now a World Heritage city, we make sure that less vibration is produced, we will place a small machine in each structure on the Metro railroad to measure vibration levels”, explained Gautam… The route has been developed more than 100 meters away from the protected monuments, in accordance with the guidelines of the Archaeological Survey of India. They had conducted a survey of all the structures around the route.
Construction work for the underground section of the Metro Rail will not affect daily activities on the surface, said Metro-Link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad Company Limited on Tuesday. Construction work will begin next week and Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) will be used for the job.
Explaining how it will work, the retired IAS official from Ahmedabad, IP Gautam, general director of MEGA, said it would be as if the rats cut something. These machines have large jaws. The people on the surface will hardly know that the drilling work is underway. We have two years to finish the job, he said. The TBM will have cutting wheels, an excavation chamber, and other tools. You will also have machines working behind to lift mud or sand. We will have the machinery to discard it every 2 km on the surface.
He said that once the machines were below the surface, there would be no way to get them out unless the work was finished. The machines will also place the tracks, and the network will have two tracks. From now on, we are not a big clandestine network. According to our survey, we could find some damaged parts of hand pump tubes on the route, he said.
In Bangalore, a tunnel boring machine was severely damaged during the construction process, and because of that, Metro rail work stagnated for ten months.
MEGA is building a 32 km rail network for the first phase of the Metro rail project, of which 6.3 km are below the surface in the East-West Corridor starting from Thaltej to Vastral Gam.
The construction work will start at the Apparel Park depot, and the machines will give way to a circular tunnel. MEGA will develop the stretch in two phases. In the first phase, the machines will work on the route from Apparel Park to the Kalupur station. The diameter of the route will vary between 1 meter and 20 meters.
The underground section will have four stations, including the Kalupur station, which will become the junction point, merging with the existing train station and the next Bullet train station. The other three are the Kankaria station, the Shahpur station, and the Gheekanta station.
