The Bogibeel – India’s Rail cum Road Bridge built across Brahmaputra – is opened for public

Posted By: Kiran Prakashanon: December 26, 2018In: NewsNo Comments

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the Bogibeel railroad bridge in Assam, The labeled as India’s longest railroad bridge. bridge is of 4.9 km length across Brahmaputra river.
It is a strategic bridge, which connects Dibrugarh district on the river’s south bank in Assam to Dhemaji district on the north bank. It will cut the travel time between the two points by four hours and help avoid a 170-km detour.
With its proximity to the China border, the bridge also has tremendous significance for India’s defense and has been built strong enough to support the movement of tanks and even fighter jet landings.
It is constructed at an estimated cost of Rs 5,900 crore, Asia’s second-longest rail-road bridge is part of infrastructure projects planned to improve logistics along the border in Arunachal Pradesh.

Project Bogibeel Bridge
The project was conceived by the Rail India Technical Economic Services in 1973, and the foundation stone was laid by former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda in January 1997. The actual work was initiated only in 2002 by the NDA government, which was headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
After several years of slow progress, the Bogibeel bridge was granted a national project status by the Government of India in 2007 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The bridge was planned to be completed by 2009 but has since witnessed huge time and cost overruns. Initially estimated at ₹67 billion, the cost of completion has since escalated to ₹32.30 billion and the final cost has reached up to ₹49.96 billion.
The Northeast Frontier Railway contracted Gammon India in April 2008 to construct the sub-structure of the bridge while a consortium of Hindustan Construction Company, DSD Brückenbau GmbH, Germany and VNR Infrastructures have won the bid to build the superstructure.

Construction and Build quality
The design of Bogibeel bridge has 39 spans of 125 m and a superstructure of composite welded steel truss and reinforced concrete. It is designed to carry a double line 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) broad gauge railway on the lower deck and a 3-lane road on the upper deck.
The project took 30 lakh bags of cement – enough to fill more than 41 Olympic swimming pools and 19,250 metres of reinforcement steel – well over twice the height of Mount Everest.

The Bogibeel Bridge is likely to play an important role in defence movement along the India-China border in Arunachal Pradesh. The three road lanes of the bridge can act as three landing strips for the Air Force