A senior member of the Railway Board who is aware of the developments said that Indian Railways intends to operationalize more than 1,300 route miles of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor by the end of this year.

According to Railway officials, over 77% of the project had been put into operation by the end of June. On August 2, the Railways finished track connection work on the Sonnagar-Ludhiana line.

Another part of 538 route km – also a part of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor – between Sonnagar and West Bengal’s Dankuni was proposed to be developed under a PPP model.

The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor originally had a route length of over 1,850 km, traversing through six states – Punjab (89 km), Haryana (72 km), UP (1078 km), Bihar (239 km), Jharkhand (195 km) and West Bengal (203 km) and consists of two distinct segments - an electrified double-track segment of 1,409 km between Dankuni in West Bengal and Khurja in Uttar Pradesh, and an electrified single-track segment of 447 km across Ludhiana (Dhandarikalan) - Khurja - Dadri in the state of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.