Railway project hits a roadblock

Kochi: Often, its delay in executing projects that brings financial loss to the Railways.

But, it's the other way round in the case of the Vathuruthy railway gate replacement, which has incurred a cost of over Rs 10 lakh by now.

Three months ago, the Railways planned to replace Vathuruthy’s old iron railway cross gates, the only one of its kind left in the state, with automatic lifting barriers.

This, after the Navy had objected to setting up a rail overbridge at the section cutting across the busy NH 47, citing proximity of the naval airport located close by.

The manual railway gates used to consume a lot of time while closing and opening, resulting in long traffic jams at the entry and exit points of the city.

"We’re planning to increase the frequency of goods trains from the Ernakulam wharf. So we decided to replace the gates with automatic lifting barriers at a cost of over Rs 10 lakh," Railway sources said.

The railways even wrote to the Port Trust, Navy and other agencies concerned  seeking sanction for the work. However, none of them responded for close to two months and the Railways started the work hoping for a positive nod from them.

"The Navy has now sent us a stop memo asking us to discontinue the work. It says the automatic gates would be dangerous to aircraft activities.  Now our only hope lies in negotiations at a higher level," they said.