Within a month of the commencement of Operation Sindoor, it was Sankha Naad time for Bharat as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at 1200 hours on Friday, 6 June, flagged off two Vande Bharat Express trains — one from Katra to Srinagar and another from Srinagar to Katra.

The Tricolour flies high over the Chenab Rail Bridge!It’s a feeling of immense pride that this bridge seamlessly blends ambition with execution, reflecting India’s growing capability to build futuristic infrastructure in the most challenging terrains. pic.twitter.com/PrqELwfO7k

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 6, 2025

In addition to being an extraordinary feat of architecture, the Chenab Rail Bridge will improve connectivity between Jammu and Srinagar. The Anji Bridge stands tall as India’s first cable-stayed rail bridge in a terrain that is challenging.

The Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) project ensures all-weather connectivity, and the Vande Bharat trains from Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra to Srinagar will boost spiritual tourism and create livelihood opportunities."

Also taking to X, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw wrote: “Ready to connect Kashmir with every heart of India… Vande Bharat."

This latest wonder project of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) fulfils the more than a hundred-year-old dream of Maharaja Pratap Singh to have an all-weather, seamless rail connectivity between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of the country.

It also marked the culmination of the audacious dream envisioned by the visionary Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of seamlessly connecting “Kashmir to Kanyakumari", thereby transforming mobility and driving the socio-economic integration of the Kashmir Valley with the rest of Bharat.

The 272 km long USBRL project, aptly described as Kashmir’s rail renaissance, constructed at a completion cost of around Rs 43,780 crore, is an unmatched engineering marvel. The complex project includes 36 tunnels spanning 119 kilometres in extremely difficult terrain and also boasts 943 bridges.

Majestic as the project is, surveying the railway alignment and constructing this “Made in India wonder" amid extremely hostile terrain, inclement weather conditions and the ever-present threat of terrorism, stands as a tall tribute to the Indian railway engineers, workers, consultants and contractors.

In the paragraphs below, I describe key aspects of the technological marvel that the project is:

One: The Longest Rail Tunnel

Tunnel T50, measuring 12.77 kilometres and connecting Khari and Sumber, is the longest rail tunnel ever constructed in the country.

Excavated using the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM), the tunnel navigates highly complex geological strata, including quartzite, gneiss and phyllite. The construction faced myriad challenges, including but not limited to sudden high-water ingress, landslides, shear zones and jointed volcanic rock formations.

To meet these engineering challenges, engineers bore through three adits (access tunnels), allowing simultaneous construction from multiple faces and thereby accelerating the........

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